“I was sitting at my desk” in a law practice in Colorado Springs, the United States Olympic capital, watching, he tells me.

The certainty with which he says this is not the product of a freakish memory or an immaculate diary habit. It is explained by something that was happening 5,000 miles away in the Danish capital Copenhagen.

I bet half of Brazil can remember what they were doing then as well. This was the morning that Rio de Janeiro discovered that it was to be the first South American city to host the Olympics, the greatest festival in world sport.

Eighty-five minutes before the announcement that sent then President Lula, the football icon Pelé and untold millions of their compatriots into paroxysms of joy, the Bella Convention Centre had been left stunned by another disclosure.

This was that the US candidate Chicago, supported in Denmark in person by a US President who at the time seemed to walk on water, had been eliminated from the four-city contest in the very first round.

While relations between the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the US sports establishment had often been strained over the 13 years since the ill-starred Atlanta Games, this was, in the words of Eddie Cochran, Somethin’ Else, a very public humiliation that threatened to overshadow for years to come links between the world’s most powerful sports body and a nation whose corporations provided a big chunk of its funding. 

Inside four months, Blackmun found himself, as newly-appointed chief executive of the United States Olympic Committee (USOC), a key figure in the process of picking up the pieces.

It is very much to his credit that six years on, the state of one of the most important bilateral relationships in world sport has improved so markedly that the US capital is preparing this week to host one of the biggest set-piece occasions of the Olympic year – the Association of National Olympic Committees (ANOC) General Assembly.

“We had been encouraged by the ANOC leadership to look for opportunities to host,” Blackmun says in a telephone interview, adding: “It seemed like the right time to do that.

“We are not doing it for any tangible purpose other than because to be part of this Movement you need to do things like this.

“In 2010 we made the decision we wanted to be a more active, engaged participant…

“For the US, the Olympic Movement is important. Given its importance to us, it did not make any sense for us to be only observing from the sidelines.

“Our country loves the Olympic Movement. Our citizens love to watch the Olympic Games. Our athletes have always been leaders in their field. It only seemed appropriate that our administrators had a contribution commensurate with our athletes.”

This concern with becoming more engaged is one of three things identified as “priorities” by Blackmun and his colleagues in the wake of Chicago’s Danish pasting.

Another was “trying to create a culture of service to our national federations” within a USOC whose chairman, Larry Probst, was also relatively new in the role, having been elected in October 2008.

“For so long,” Blackmun elaborates, “the USOC was more of a gatekeeper than a facilitator or a partner”, sometimes making it harder for national federations to succeed by creating rules and regulations that made their lives more difficult.

Now, he emphasises, the USOC wants to “add value to their programmes”.

A third priority was to resolve a source of irritation that had begun to impact relations with the IOC so badly that some even blamed it for the severity of Chicago’s defeat. This was a revenue-sharing arrangement under which proportions of the sums generated by both the IOC’s TOP worldwide sponsorship programme and the rights to broadcast the Olympic Games in the US were paid to the USOC.

Many in the Movement had come to believe that the percentages earmarked for the USOC – 20 per cent of TOP money (minus a management fee) and 12.75 per cent of the value of the broadcast deal – were unduly generous; yet the USOC, unlike many other National Olympic Committees (NOCs), has to get by without Government funding and could ill afford to take too much of a hit.

Well it took more than two-and-a-half years after the Chicago debacle, but eventually, in May 2012, a solution was found. In a deal that will click in from 2020, the USOC agreed to accept smaller shares (10 and 7 per cent respectively) of any future increments in these two revenue streams beyond current levels. A separate agreement had seen the USOC consent to make a significant contribution to the administrative costs of staging the Games.

When the deal was unveiled at the 2012 SportAccord Convention in Québec City, Probst said it set the stage for “a much more collaborative relationship going forward”. Then IOC President Jacques Rogge described it as “a very happy moment for the IOC and the USOC”.

In fact, the final bargain had been struck a few days earlier in this week’s ANOC General Assembly host-city of Washington D.C at a meeting between Blackmun and IOC director general Christophe De Kepper.

While Blackmun takes pains, when I raise this, to credit the two negotiating teams, he acknowledges that “Christophe and I were able to nudge it across the finish-line”.

Where, I wondered, had this momentous “nudge” taken place? “I believe we were at our law firm’s office in Washington.”

Had they perhaps shared a glass of bubbly to celebrate? “Christophe is all work.”

I asked Blackmun if US officials had at once concluded, on striking the deal, that the country could now once again bid for the Games with a better chance of victory?

“I don’t think we tied those two things together,” he replies.

“We did begin discussing whether we wanted to bid again right after Chicago’s loss”, eventually deciding to sit out both the 2020 and 2022 contests.

Why in that case not go for 2020, which had turned out to be very open?

He responds that the “primary reason” was the “significant” leadership change at the USOC. “We realised we wanted to have a firmer foundation off which to bid. I think we have been able to find a firmer foundation.”

While USOC-IOC relations are undoubtedly warmer now than at any time since I started covering the Movement in detail in 2001, in the wake of the Salt Lake City affair, there have still been signs that the US leadership is not altogether bowled over by the way the IOC selects its host-cities.

First, in June 2014, Probst, an IOC member himself, was reported to have said that he would like to see the IOC Executive Board decide where the Games were held. The USOC chairman explained subsequently that he “served that up [at a conference] as, you know, ‘Here’s an idea, here’s a thought’", and that “upon further thinking about it, it might not be such a terrible idea to have the Executive Board get down to a couple of cities and then put the vote between those two cities to the full membership”. 

A few months later, Blackmun – asked what one thing about the Olympics he would change if he could – responded: “If you look at how we select the cities for the Olympic Games, rightly or wrongly it’s very different than the way a business organisation would make that selection…It would be great if we could find a way to strategically make that selection in a way that helped build the Olympic brand around the world.”

Bearing in mind such comments – and given that we now know, after the embarrassing false-start of Boston, that a strong US candidate, Los Angeles, is in the 2024 race, along with the European quartet of Budapest, Hamburg, Paris and Rome – I ask Blackmun the following question: Whether we are left with two, three, four or five candidates at the 2017 IOC Session in Lima where the 2024 hosting decision will be made, are you 100 per cent confident that IOC members will make the right choice for the Olympic Movement?

His reply? “I am 100 per cent confident that the IOC members will make the right choice for the Olympic Movement.”

To be fair, the USOC chief executive had earlier volunteered that, while he found the earliness of Chicago’s exit in the 2016 competition surprising, “personally I think Rio was a brilliant choice”. It was, he acknowledged, time for the Games to go to South America.

With more than 1,000 registered participants, as against 7-800 estimated initially, ANOC’s return to the US for its General Assembly for the first time since 1994 already appears to have secured the Movement’s seal of approval. “That is a positive sign that this is a place they want to visit,” Blackmun says.

“We have been very, very successful in working with the State Department to make sure people who need to be here were granted access,” he adds.

All five 2024 bid cities are expected to be there, although there will be no formal presentations. The USOC chief executive describes the event as “a really useful way for each of the cities to get exposure to the Olympic Movement and the NOCs in particular”.

A key symbolic moment for the USOC will come on Wednesday evening, when it hosts a Welcome Reception at the 19th-century National Building Museum, an edifice completed at around the time Baron Pierre de Coubertin was conceiving his idea for a revival of the Ancient Olympic Games. The Rome 2024 contingent should feel particularly at home there, since its design was inspired by two Renaissance-era Roman Palazzos.

“The primary gift we want to deliver is a well-executed meeting,” Blackmun concludes, “Our focus is exclusively on enabling ANOC to host a great meeting.”

No doubt some of the great and the good of the most powerful political town on the planet will see fit to put in an appearance as the week’s events take their course under the stewardship of ANOC President Sheikh Ahmad Al-Fahad Al-Sabah.

Given the events of October 2. 2009, however, I would not stake any of my money on the Obamas being among them.