Standing in this moderately-sized wood-panelled room on Olympic Day last week, I found it hard to fathom the passions that must have flowed through it on that summer’s day exactly 122 years earlier.

Did the 31-year-old Baron Pierre de Coubertin, his handlebar moustache yet to take on the grey of age, glance occasionally at the Salle Greard’s assymetric stained glass windows of pale lemon and mauve as he attempted to shape the delegates into acceptance of the vision that had been growing in his mind since he had read Tom Brown’s Schooldays, that paean to muscular Christianity, as a teenager and concluded that “organised sport can create moral and social strength”?

A total of 79 delegates and sports associations from 12 countries had been persuaded to attend this meeting of the Union des Societes Francaises de Sports Athletiques (USFSA), a national association to coordinate sports in France which had been created by De Coubertin.

At the USFSA’s annual gathering two years earlier, his first public suggestion of reviving the Ancient Olympics had met with polite applause and widespread indifference.  This time round the notion of establishing a modern Games was linked with a discussion of the lamentable erosion of amateurism in sport, and the Congress was divided into two Commissions.

After an Opening Ceremony which began with the “Hymn to Apollo” which had just been discovered in Delphi, and transcribed and re-orchestrated by Theodore Reinach and Gabrielle Faure, the business of sporting history got underway.

The Commission dealing with the Olympics proposed the new Games be held every four years with a programme of modern sports, with the first to be held in Athens in 1896 – and that it be guided by a new body, the the Comite International des Jeux Olympiques, or International Olympic Committee (IOC). 

These proposals were accepted unanimously by the Congress on the final day, and 14 IOC members were selected, with the Greek who had headed the Commission, Demetrius Vikelas, being chosen as the first President.

In his closing address to the Congress, Coubertin was exultant:

“In this year, 1894, and in this city of Paris, whose joys and anxieties the world shares so closely that it has been likened to the world’s nerve centre, we were able to bring together the representatives of international athletics, who voted unanimously for the restitution of a 2,000-year-old idea, which today, as in the past, still quickens the human heart…

“Since the Middle Ages a sort of discredit has hovered over bodily qualities and they have been isolated from qualities of the mind.

“This has been an immense error, the scientific and social consequences of which it is almost impossible to calculate...the men of antiquity knew this and we are painfully relearning it…

“The adherents of the old school groaned when they saw us holding our meetings in the heart of the Sorbonne: they realised that we were rebels and that we would finish by casting down the edifice of their worm-eaten philosophy.

“I lift my glass to the Olympic idea, which has traversed the mists of the ages like an all-powerful ray of sunlight and returned to illumine the threshold of the twentieth century with a gleam of joyous hope.”

With the threshold of the 21^st century now crossed, the Olympic idea is still re-shaping and re-forming itself as the Movement struggles with a mass of challenges, most pressing of which is the awkward political problem of how to deal with Russia in the light of successive allegations of systematised doping abuse within its sporting echelons.

Earlier in the day there had been a photograph taken in front of the plaque that was set up in the Salle Greard to mark the 100^th anniversary of the creation of the IOC “en ces lieux” – a group shot of leading lights behind the Paris 2024 bid.

Reportedly, the Paris 2024 Board meeting in which they had all been engaged in the hallowed confines of this ancient institute of learning was conducted in a spirit of widespread cooperation, and producing a succession of unanimous decisions.

Articulating support at every level of government, from national to regional to metropolitan, has been one of the key policies of a bid that is determined not to take such unity for granted in the manner of previous Paris initiatives.

And as they went about their business on Olympic Day, it was possible to detect in the faces of such as Anne Hidalgo, Mayor of Paris, and Tony Estanguet, the triple Olympic canoeing champion who co-chairs the Bid with Bernard Lapasset, something of the “gleam of joyous hope” of which Coubertin had spoken in his moment of triumph.