It is here that the records and papers of the Olympics are stored, a vast collection of some 38,000 items which chronicle the history of the Olympic movement, from the time in 1894 when the decision was taken during a Congress in Paris to revive the Olympic Games.

Approximately a quarter of the material is now digitised, revealing long forgotten stories from the history of the Games and each day, students, university professors and yes, even journalists find their way here.

"Education and the academic world was at the heart of the Olympic mission even before the Olympic Studies Centre was created," Bach said.

"The Olympic Studies Centre allowed us to accelerate and to deepen this work, and in this way promote deeper understanding of the Olympic values across the globe."

Looking out from the elegant Villa Centenaire across Lake Geneva as I have been able to do this week, it is hard to imagine a more pleasant place in which to discover some of the secrets of the sporting past.

Baron Pierre de Coubertin was the French nobleman who organised that Congress in 1894.

He formally became IOC President after the first Olympics was held in Athens in 1896.

It was at his suggestion that the organisation moved its headquarters to Lausanne shortly after the outbreak of the first world war.

During the war years, he took a step back and installed the Swiss aristocrat Baron Godefroy de Blonay as Interim President, but still remained deeply involved behind the scenes.

After the war, Coubertin resumed the leadership and eventually continued in office until 1925.

"I have not been able to carry out to the end what I wanted to perfect," Coubertin reflected in 1937 shortly before his death.

"I think that a centre of Olympic studies would aid the preservation and progress of my work more than anything else."

There had been attempts to start an Olympic Museum at Mon Repos, an 18th century chateau high above the city.

The official headquarters of the IOC was established there a century ago in 1922.

The building was owned by the City of Lausanne which still used some parts for other purposes.

The IOC was still very much a 'kitchen sink' operation at the time with a very small staff.

There were attempts to set up an Olympic institute in Germany in the years immediately before the second world war.

When German officials tried to move papers and documents to Berlin, it is said that papers and other items were hidden away by staff in Lausanne.

After the second world war, attempts were made to establish a regular Olympic Museum at Mon Repos.

A Lausanne jeweller, Otto Mayer had been put in charge of running the IOC office and was given the title IOC chancellor.

There was clearly much to do.

In 1950, a note in Olympic Review, the official IOC magazine made an appeal.

"We deeply regret to note however that we possess nothing or hardly anything on the first Olympiades, Athens 1896, Paris 1900 St Louis 1904 and London 1908," it said.

"We address a pressing appeal to all the members of the IOC, to former members, to all the National Olympic Committees, requesting them to send us any documents or photos they may possess on these Olympiades of the past," the appeal continued.

"It is indeed of the highest interest for the Olympic Museum to collect as much evidence as possible on the difficult period of the early days of Olympism. In advance our most hearty thanks," the appeal concluded.

Pierre de Coubertin's octogenarian widow Marie still occupied living quarters in the chateau which apparently caused some friction, but in 1950, she bequeathed the chair in which Coubertin sat as he formulated many of his ideas on Olympism.

"The Baroness de Coubertin still takes a very keen interest in all that relates to the Olympic movement and by her repeated gifts and her visits to the museum she gives us the proofs of this attachment," Olympic officials said.

When the Olympic Torch Relay had passed through Lausanne on its way to London in 1948, she had been there to watch it pass.

Meanwhile, the widow of Baron de Blonay, the interim first world war President, welcomed the IOC to the family seat at Grandson, some 40 kilometres away from Lausanne.

She donated De Blonay's Olympic archive, which was described as a "new acquisition of ancient documents with which the library and the museum are so poorly provided."

Mayer meanwhile did his best to keep the museum open to the public but throughout the 1950s, Olympic bulletins bemoaned the lack of visitors to the site.

Eventually, the museum closed and all the artefacts went into storage.

The election of Juan Antonio Samaranch as IOC President in 1980 opened the next chapter.

Samaranch was a philatelist and a collector and he soon announced plans for an Olympic Museum.

The veteran Swiss IOC member Raymond Gafner was put in charge of the new project and 40 years ago this week, a new museum and studies centre opened in the centre of Lausanne at the Avenue Ruchonnet.

The site was only 200 square metres in area so the museum was necessarily very small.

"It cannot really be called a museum at the moment, but rather a thematic exhibition which illustrates the Olympic epic," Gafner admitted.

Young athletes from around the Lausanne region were recruited as guides.

The museum was described as "provisional" because an even grander project to build an Olympic Museum on the shores of Lake Geneva at Ouchy was envisaged.

"It is a magnificent site with splendid views of Savoy and the Alps," Gafner said.

The project was originally planned for completion in 1986 but it eventually opened with great fanfare on June 23, Olympic Day in 1993.

A Relay carried a Flame from the Ecole Polytechnique de Lausanne to the museum where the cauldron was lit by double Olympic figure skating champion Katerina Witt.

It burns perpetually, unlike the Olympic Flame which is lit separately for each celebration of the Games.

The OSC with thousands of documents, artefacts and books, was initially moved to the basement of the museum.

For the first time, it was possible to see letters and other correspondence written by Coubertin and other leading personalities, providing of course that you could decipher the handwriting.

That did not prove a problem for the eminent French scholar Jean Durry, who published a book on the writings of Coubertin.

The late German academic Norbert Muller and others collated the writings of the Olympic founder into three weighty volumes.

Muller's successor as International Pierre de Coubertin Committee President Stephan Wassong was amongst those present to celebrate the anniversary.

"The OSC is the relay station between the academic world, society and the Olympic movement and is really part of the legacy of Coubertin's thoughts to the present day," Wassong said.

So vast has the OSC collection become that not all the artefacts are displayed there is a veritable Aladdin's cave of Olympic treasures, torches from previous Games and other artefacts.

"Our extended library here in Lausanne is open so that people can come here and consult the physical collections that we hold, it is also a digital Olympic world library that is offering us new possibilities to share Olympic knowledge," OSC head Maria Bogner explained.

It has been calculated that the centre has fielded around 70,000 requests, sometimes highly detailed for Olympic material.

They have also established an international network with 55 Olympic studies centres in 23 countries across the world.