Friday’s vote to select Rio de Janeiro as the first South American Olympic host city opened a new chapter for the Movement.
 

But it also marked the end of an era.
 

Ever since Madrid 2016’s candidacy was officially announced a number of us Olympic anoraks had been carrying around an image in our mind’s eye.
 

This was of an old man coming to the podium to address the 121st International Olympic Committee (IOC) Session and begging IOC members assembled there to grant him his dying wish.
 

At around 3.30pm on October 2 in the pleasant Danish capital of Copenhagen, that vision became reality.
 

"I know that I am very near the end of my time," said Juan Antonio Samaranch Torelló, Marqués de Samaranch and the man who, for nearly a generation, was master of all he surveyed in the Olympic Movement. "I am, as you know, 89 years old. May I ask you to consider granting my country the honour, and also the duty, to organise the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2016?"
 

Some three hours later, he got his answer.
 

And while the veneration in which he is still held by many members who know that the Movement would probably not have survived without him, propelled the Spanish capital into the final run-off, it was nowhere near enough.
 

The Samaranch period, which started in 1980 in Moscow with his election as 7th IOC President, was well and truly over.
 

Some will argue that his demise should be dated from 2005, when Madrid lost out to London in its bid to win the 2012 Games, or 2001, when his Presidency ended.
 

But the abiding impression from Singapore, where the vote on 2012 was conducted, was that little Madrid had come astonishingly close to upsetting its four ultra-heavyweight rivals (London, Paris, New York and Moscow).
 

The octogenarian could still manifestly exert a heavy influence on the decisions that mattered.
 

His enduring clout was underlined two years later, when Sochi won the right to stage the 2014 Winter Games in a race in which I am told his influence, though exercised very late in the day, was once again in evidence.
 

Others may say that the family still has its stamp on the Movement in the shape of Samaranch Snr’s son, Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr, an IOC member since 2001.
 

I like Samaranch the younger.
 

An impromptu monologue he delivered in a hotel bar for the benefit of the IOC’s Dick Pound and myself in the final days before the vote, on the process of campaigning, was a truly virtuoso performance.
 

But I cannot, at this point, see him pulling off the trick that, coincidentally, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley has managed: that of following a father with the same name into the same high office.
 

No, the era is over and for that reason I think October 2 - as opposed to October 9, when IOC members are expected to vote on giving him a second term - may also go down as the moment that Jacques Rogge stepped unambiguously out of the shadow and took a firmer grip on this incorrigibly quirky organisation.
 

I am far from sure that the straight-laced Belgian surgeon, and former yachtsman, is capable of experiencing schadenfreude.  
 

But, if he is, he must surely have felt it when his predecessor paid public tribute, during that last appeal for votes, to his "masterly leadership".
 

October 2 was the most significant day for the Olympic Movement for a long, long time – it may also now face a tough battle to maintain US commercial support at anything like current levels, but that’s another story.
 

And it was not all down to Rio.
 

● The received wisdom on Friday’s vote is likely to be that the Brazilians bossed it.
 

And Rio’s 66-32 victory margin in the final run-off with Madrid was nothing if not emphatic.
 

The detailed figures, though, tell a different story.
 

Faced with a first-round choice between four bids, all impressive but none perfect, the opinion of IOC members was so divided that almost anything could have happened.
 

Madrid actually "won" that first round with 28 votes, followed by Rio (26), Tokyo (22) and Chicago (18).

Quite a number of IOC members, I suspect, would have been torn in particular between voting for Chicago and Rio. (The Americas were, after all, the only geographic zone with more than one candidate.)
 

That’s why I wrote in January that it wouldn't surprise me if one or other of them turned out to be the first city eliminated.
 

So, looked at another way, those first-round figures show that had Chicago's last-ditch change of tack in the final month of the campaign wooed another five members away from the South American bid, Rio would have replaced them as first city eliminated.
 

Had they wooed just four members away, we'd have had a three-way tie for last place.
 

Rio ultimately won this contest so comfortably for one simple reason: away from their core supporters, they were everybody’s second choice.
 

That’s a lesson worth absorbing for candidates assembling at the start-line for the 2018 Winter Olympics race.

David Owen is a specialist sports journalist who worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering last year's Beijing Olympics. An archive of Owen’s material may be found by Twitter users at www.twitter.com/dodo938