It was the sort of coming together you could only really imagine happening in Olympicland; and in this case it took place in that surreal realm’s very epicentre - the Palace hotel in Lausanne - in July 2013.

Why bring it up now?

Partly because I was reminded of it by the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s recent choice of the Colombian President as winner of its award.

But mainly to underline how the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is enduring one of those periods when it just cannot cop a break.

Without cataloguing the various mishaps, I think we can all agree it has been an extremely challenging year-and-a-bit for the Olympic Movement.

So how welcome/timely/expedient it would have been for IOC President Thomas Bach and his colleagues to be able to hail a strong link to the winner of perhaps the most prestigious annual award it is possible for a human being to receive.

That is just what they would have been able to do last week if only they had elected the city of Medellín to host the 2018 Summer Youth Olympic Games.

It is this election that explains why the three of us - Hoy, Santos and me - happened momentarily to converge during a chi-chi cocktail party in bourgeois Switzerland a little over three years ago: Santos was there to bang the drum for the former narco-city; Hoy to do likewise for its rival Glasgow; and me to watch and write it all up.

Yet when the critical vote came on July 4 it was the other candidate in the race - Buenos Aires - which won 49-39 in an all-South American run-off after Glasgow had been knocked out in the first round.

I think quite a few of us sensed at the time that this was not a mistake exactly, but not the best decision.

An Olympic Games - albeit of the youth variety - would have been one of the biggest events in Colombia’s history.

Moreover, its setting in the former fief of drug baron Pablo Escobar would have made it a big international story as well.

It would have secured the event front-page as well as back-page treatment all over the world in a way I am not sure Buenos Aires will.

I suppose now, the way things have panned out, we have been proved right.

And yet, handing victory to Medellín would have been a massive risk: the fact that a peace deal between the Colombian Government and left-wing Farc guerrillas was only reached last August - and, lest we forget, has now been rejected in a referendum - means that Colombia was a country at war at the time of the Olympic vote, although peace talks were under way.

If things had gone wrong, the IOC might have been declared crazy for obliging some of the most talented teenagers in the world to go there.

Though I have been quite critical of the custodians of the Games in recent times, the decision to go with Buenos Aires was readily understandable, and the Argentinian capital’s backers are entitled still to feel it was the correct move, given the information available at the time.

What I do want to do, though, is use Santos’s recognition to express the hope - as the voting process for the Big One, the Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games, becomes necessarily and rightly more rigorous and, probably, predictable - that the Movement does not feel obliged to take the host selection process for the Youth Games in the same direction.

If the Youth Olympic Games is worth keeping at all, it is partly for its capacity to act as a laboratory, a forum for experimentation, helping the Movement to future-proof itself.

Were some sort of disaster to befall the Olympic Games proper, the consequences would sweep through world sport with the force of some natural catastrophe, so important are they for generating funds for many International Sports Federations (IFs).

The IOC consequently owes it to world sport to treat its flagship property with utmost care.

No such heavy weight of financial responsibility rests on the metaphorical shoulders of the Youth Olympics.

The Youth Games are an ideal vehicle for the IOC to make clear that it retains a spirit of adventure, a certain appetite for inspired risk-taking.

It would perhaps be difficult for Medellín to mount a bid for what will now be the 2023 Youth Olympics and I am aware of no sign that they intend to do so: you would not normally expect the IOC to stage two editions of the same event in a row in South America.

But I hope, if they are offered any choice at all in today’s straitened circumstances, that the IOC, battered as they have been by recent events, will allow their collective imagination a relatively free rein when picking the next Youth Olympic Games host.  

Medellín has just the sort of back story that might have helped make the future of the event more secure, giving non-sports addicts a reason to sit up and take notice.