It transpired that no-one, apart from myself, realised they were just over a fortnight away.

“Haven’t even thought about them to be honest," declared one of my companions. “When do they begin?”

True, apart from a couple of golfers none of the gathering were particular sports buffs but you would have thought that after 2012 and all that there should be some sort of anticipation about what is going to happen when the Olympic flame lights up Rio on Friday, August 5. 

Yes, most had heard about the Zika virus and the almighty rumpus row over the Russian drugs-bust but the general consensus was that there has been too much else going on, what with Brexit, the crop of terrorist and gun atrocities in France, the United States and elsewhere, Euro 2016 and Andy Murray’s Wimbledon triumph to debate who might win the Olympic long jump.

So out of idle curiosity I enquired if any of them knew the name of the current President of the International Olympic Committee, arguably the most powerful presence in world sport?

Brows were furrowed and chins were stroked.

Eventually two said they thought it was Seb Coe; another queried “is it still that French chappie Jacques Roger?" 

The one lady present volunteered the name of Sepp Blatter - “but didn’t he get arrested or something?” 

Another shrugged “no idea” while at least my Aussie pal knew it was “some bloke from Germany, Thomas something-or-other".

Well, Thomas Bach (for that is he) may not be a household name in my manor but I have a hunch that by the time the flame flickers and dies on Sunday, August 21 the world at large will know a great deal more about the 62-year-old multi-lingual lawyer from Wurzburg. As it should.

For Herr Bach is about to preside over what surely will be one of the most contentious Games in history.

It is so for all sorts of reasons, not least the explosive game of Russian roulette now being played out before they begin. 

How Bach and his Executive Board plan to respond to the gob-smacking WADA report that found Russia concealed hundreds of positive doping tests ahead of the Sochi Winter Games and that doping was endemic throughout some 30 Summer and Winter Olympic sports will determine his legacy, and perhaps that of the entire Olympic movement.

For as Michele Verroken, the one-time czarina of UK’s anti-doping strategy, succinctly put it this week: "Not only is the integrity of the Olympic movement at stake, but the integrity of sport itself is at stake."

Only nine nations have missed an entire Olympics because they have been suspended from the IOC: Germany, Austria, Turkey, Hungary and Japan were banned because they were deemed to be aggressors in the two World Wars. The other four were South Africa, Rhodesia, North Korea and Afghanistan.

Russia must now make it the imperfect 10 because the horrifying extent of the systematic, state-colluded doping in Russian sport, dating back into the Soviet bloc era, is one of the worst crimes ever perpetrated in the name of the Games.

And Bach, I am sure, has too much nous and decency to allow his close friendship with Russia’s President Putin to cloud his judgement.

He called it “a shocking and unprecedented attack on the integrity of sports and on the Olympic Games” and that the IOC “will not hesitate to take the toughest sanctions available against any individual or organisation implicated.” Well he knows what to do about it.

There can be no bottling it.                                                    

How he manoeuvres the Olympics through this chemical tsunami will be watched with intrigue because world sport is crying out for strong moral leadership after some of the sickening descent into corruption within orgnaisations such as the IAAF, FIFA and, not that long ago, the IOC itself.

Bach can provide it.

Compared to some of the aristos and autocrats who have run the IOC in past Bach, the body’s ninth President, seems to represent a welcome return to normality. 

I have never met him, but from what I hear he is one of the good guys in the game.

He also happens to be the one Olympic President who has actually stood on the rostrum and had a gold medal draped around his neck - for the team foil fencing event at Montreal 1976.

A far cry, indeed, in character and disposition from the likes of the awful demagogue ‘Slavery’ Avery Brundage and the imperious grandee Juan Antonio Samaranch.

Unlike Baron Pierre de Coubertin, Count Henri de Baillet-Latourand and Lord Killanin (who actually was a lovely, laid-back chap) Bach, like his immediate predecessor, the Belgian surgeon Jacques Rogge, is not of noble stock.

And as such he can bring the Games closer to those who are beginning to turn their backs on them.

Rio 2016 could be the making of him with his celebrated surname appropriately striking the appropriate chord.

With the IOC having made their initial deliberations on Tuesday on whether to block the recalcitrant Russians’ road to Rio, it is time for Bach to show his bite.