After years of discussing the successor to International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Jacques Rogge in the shadows, the candidates have started to emerge into the light as the crucial vote for the most powerful position in world sport looms closer.

The vote is due to take place on September 10 at the 125th IOC Session in Buenos Aires during a gathering that will also see the 2020 Olympic and Paralympic host city announced and a sport voted onto the programme for those Games (or if it is wrestling, retained).

But if you ask any IOC member in private, electing the ninth President of the Olympic Movement is by far the most important vote they feel they will cast in the Argentinian capital.

The man everyone is discussing as the favourite to succeed Rogge, who was elected at the Session in Moscow in 2001 to succeed Juan Antonio Samaranch, is Germany's Thomas Bach.

One of the worst kept secrets in the Olympic Movement finally came out last week when the Montreal 1976 fencing champion became the first candidate to officially declare that he will stand to replace Rogge at a hastily organised press conference in Frankfurt.

Bach has been talked about as the most likely successor Rogge for several years but the status of early front-runner is not always a good thing in a race such as this and the German no longer appears overwhelming favourite he was just six months ago.

The favourite he probably remains though, largely because the IOC is a Eurocentric organisation with 43 of the current 101 IOC members hailing from the continent and seven of the eight Presidents so far having come from Europe; the exception being American Avery Brundage, who served from 1952 to 1972.

But even if some of the media are already proclaiming him the victor, Bach knows it will be the 100 other IOC members that will be of sole importance to his bid.

"It is very much about convincing the individual members rather than the worldwide public at large," Bach said upon unveiling his candidacy, clearly aware that the majority of those who have installed him a favourite, including several bookmakers, are completely irrelevant.

Next on the list is Singapore's Ng Ser Miang, yesterday became the second candidate to officially declare that he will stand to replace Rogge with a press conference in Paris.

This, though, wasn't any old press conference.

Ng's cleverly constructed gathering took place at Paris-Sorbonne University; the exact location where the founder of the Modern Olympics Baron Pierre de Coubertin held the first ever Olympic Congress in 1894 in a historic gathering that led to the revival of Games in Athens two years later.

Coubertin was the longest serving IOC President, holding the position for 29 years from 1896 to 1925, and in his bid to become the Frenchman's latest successor, Ng unveiled a vision that the founder of the Modern Olympics would be proud of.

Ng spoke most prominently on youth, saying: "We must harness the collective power of Olympism for the benefit of the world's youth - and we must refocus our efforts on the education of youth through the values of sport, for they are tomorrow's living Olympic legacies."

Already he is sending out his manifesto to the IOC members and that coupled with the symbolic location of the announcement, shows he was perhaps more prepared than Bach, whose Frankfurt press conference was rather rushed and who is still drafting up the final points of his own manifesto, which won't be made available to the members until next month.