Since that momentous summer of 1983 the event - biennial since 1993 - has become one of the key markers of the sporting calendar.

It is hard to think of sport being without the World Athletics Championships - and much of the credit for initiating it goes to Adriaan Paulen, the Dutchman who was President between 1976 and 1981 of what was then the International Amateur Athletic Federation.

"The vision of taking the sport out of a pure amateur status was his," Patrick Nally, a visionary sports marketer himself who worked closely with Paulen during his Presidency, told World Athletics.

After taking over from Britain’s 1928 Olympic 400m hurdles champion Lord Burghley, who had held the Presidency for 30 years, Paulen set about widening the competitive horizons and commercial possibilities for his sport.

As Nally recalls, Paulen, who died in 1985, drew upon his wide sports experience to frame a new future for track and field.

"Seeing the development work in football, he wanted the same for athletics.

"He pioneered the World Cup of 1977 and the World Championships of 1983."

The primary concerns for in the lead-up to the 1983 World Championships were money and participation.

"Financially then things weren’t as they are now" Nally recalled. "They were just starting in terms of sponsorship because we had created an exclusive approach to a limited number of sponsors for events. So there was a problem with money, because it needed money to fund the event.

"The Finnish organisers obviously couldn’t take on all the responsibility so we had to come up with a plan that would give at least a minimum amount of finance to the organisers.

"Which was then built on us doing a commercial sponsorship programme similar to the one West Nally was then doing with FIFA for the 1978 World Cup finals in Argentina, and which we went on to do at the 1982 World Cup finals in Spain.

"We put together a package of sponsors very much driven by Japan - TDK and Seiko became some of our early big supporters.

"So obviously the finance was important. And so was the establishment of getting international participation obviously, making sure of the United States, and therefore getting a good TV broadcaster, which we did with NBC.

"It was important to get all the key nations to support it, to back it, because potentially it was being looked upon as a possible replacement for the Olympics if they continued to have the dramas and boycotts they were facing.

"The fact that the Organising Committee in Finland was absolutely dedicated, with great athletics knowledge and having good facilities made it easier. But it was the first time ever so we were writing the rules from a clean sheet of paper because it had never been done before.

"And although Primo Nebiolo took the credit after becoming IAAF President in 1981, the credit really should go to Paulen."

In the end, 1,333 athletes from 153 countries participated in those inaugural Championships. And they produced some unforgettable athletics memories.

Carl Lewis won the 100 metres and long jump titles before anchoring the United States to 4x100m gold in a world record of 37.86sec.

Eamonn Coghlan of Ireland won the 5,000m title in exhilarating fashion, unable to hide his gathering glee as he took the lead on the back straight. He knew he was going to win…

The Championships also saw Britain’s 22-year-old Steve Cram claim the 1500m title ahead of such talents as Said Aouita, Steve Scott and Steve Ovett.

For home fans, with their historic love of the javelin event, there was the thrill of seeing Tiina Lillak claim the women’s title with her sixth and final effort.

"It was extraordinarily exciting," Nally recalled. "Because this Championship had never happened before. I was sitting in the stands with very knowledgeable Americans and Swiss and eastern European observers, and the buzz of seeing a meeting of that calibre for the first time outside an Olympics was amazing."

Forty years on the Championships that are about to take place in the in the 35,000-capacity National Athletics Centre that has been newly built on the banks of the River Danube - another piece in the jigsaw that Budapest hopes will eventually offer the picture of an Olympic Games - are fully established, and far larger.

The final entry lists published last week confirmed that more than 2,100 athletes from 202 teams will be taking part in the Championships that are due to run from August 19 to 27.

Now, as in 1983, participation is critical. And while the women’s world and Olympic 800 metres champion Athing Mu - under the guidance of coach Bobby Kersee - has yet to confirm she will defend her title against the Briton who chased her home both in Tokyo 2020 and Eugene 2022, Keely Hodgkinson, the main cohort of the sport’s most glittering talents will be coming to the ball.

The one big disappointment will be the absence of the world and Olympic 400m hurdles champion and world record holder Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, another Kersee athlete, who was to have run the 400m flat but has withdrawn as a precautionary issue because of a knee issue.

It is, as World Athletics President Sebastian Coe has highlighted in the lead-up to the 19th edition of these Championships, some cohort. Perhaps even uniquely so.

To mark this special anniversary, World Athletics has run a series of the 40 top moments of the event since 1983, "as voted by the fans".

The results caused some raising of eyebrows among those within the sport - for instance, the epochal men’s long jump duel at the 1991 Tokyo edition between Carl Lewis, then the double world and Olympic champion, who produced the efforts of his life, and United States team-mate Mike Powell, who earned gold with a world record of 8.95 metres that still stands, did not even make the top 10.

But there was little debate over the number one performance, by an overwhelming margin - the 100m and 200m world record double achieved by Jamaica’s Usain Bolt at the 2009 Berlin World Athletics Championships.

Bolt, who retired in 2017 - one year too late, if truth be told - has an everlasting place in the athletics pantheon.

But where this giant redwood tree once stood in the athletics forest there is now unarguable evidence of significant and more widespread growth.

Towards the end of last year World Athletics President Sebastian Coe announced at a news briefing that, to him, 2022 had looked and felt "very different" - and he cited as evidence for that hunch some interesting data commissioned from media analysis company Unicepta.

"It is an interesting one," Coe maintained.

"For the first time this year Usain Bolt has not led the list of the most written-about athletes of the year."

As it happened, the main focus had not shifted far, as - apart from the top-listed athlete, India's Olympic men's javelin champion Neeraj Chopra, the next four were Jamaican sprinters, with Elaine Thompson-Herah, Shelley-Ann Fraser-Pryce and Shericka Jackson taking their place above Bolt.

Speaking in the run-up to this year's event in Budapest, Coe warmed to the same theme as he envisioned "a World Championships for the Ages" - with his confidence stemming from the burgeoning number of outstanding male and female athletes emerging across numerous track and field disciplines.

Last year’s World Athletics Championships, at the newly re-built Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon, were the first outdoor version to be held in the United States, and the clearly signalled intent for it to be "a catalyst for growth" in a country where American football and baseball are kings.

Despite some superb performances, the staging of the Championships were problematic, and their overall impact substantially less than dramatic. Asked by insidethegames during his pre-Budapest media briefing to assess the impact of the initiative, Coe responded: "Eugene wasn’t ideal.

"It certainly posed us some challenges around broadcast numbers in Europe.

"We haemorrhaged quite a few millions of broadcasting hours."

Coe described the Eugene project as "a challenge."

A year on, as he prepares to stand unopposed for a third term in office at the World Athletics Congress in Budapest on Thursday (August 17), this double Olympic 1500m champion and multiple world record breaker who never competed at the World Championships can afford to sit back, relax and enjoy what he clearly believes is going to be a cracker of an event.

"We are heading into a World Championships, and from my position if I am trying to be a predictor of what we are about to witness then you need to look at a number of metrics," he said.

"One is the quality of the venue that’s available to you - the capacity of that venue and the way it’s designed, how fast is the track. All the things were are pretty familiar with. And on those scores I think we are doing pretty well.

"It’s a new stadium, I was there the other day, I think I was actually the first person to run a full lap - and thank God it wasn’t timed, but the saving grace was I ran with some kids.

"It is a beautiful stadium. It’s got a capacity of 40,000 or so but it’s intimate. And I think the atmosphere in there will be terrific.

"But I think the main predictor for me is the fact that I can’t actually remember a season that has got off to such promise as the one we have been witnessing.

"I was in Florence early in June for the Diamond League and I was privileged to see Faith Kipyegon become the first woman to go under 3min 50sec in the 1500 metres.

"I wasn’t as lucky as my CEO Jon Ridgeon, who was in Paris the following weekend - he saw three world records. And it’s sort of continued from there.

“And it’s not all been Diamond League. Some of the top performances we have seen have been in the Continental Tour and the National Championships - with Ryan Crouser, for instance, adding to his own world record in the shot put.

“And you look at other performances - Femke Bol the other day, breaking her European 400m hurdles record, Karsten Warholm already running under 47 seconds.

“Wherever you look we’ve got some really outstanding performers. And let’s just keep our fingers crossed that they maintain their form and their health through to Budapest, where there are potentially some great head-to-heads."

Coe is confident that the athletics is going to be as memorable as any other in history.

"So if you are sitting there as a predictor for the World Championships, the assets are in place," he said. "It’s not an exact science, it never is. But I think we could well be witnessing a World Championships for the Ages in terms of the quality of the performance of the athletes this year.

"This is the biggest event of the year. I never tire of saying we are a truly global sport. We have 2,000 athletes heading to Budapest, and over 200 competitive countries.

"And you look at broadcast - we will have 300 hours of broadcast.

"We’ve got our own host broadcaster taking about 400 people out there, with outside broadcasting units and about 120 cameras.

"We will have around two and a half thousand volunteers. This is a city that is well prepared for a big event. And having spent quite a lot of time in Budapest in the past year or so there’s a level of excitement there that I think will bode well.

"And you’ve got within driving distance and short flights some really strong athletics nations on the border as well - mainly west, not necessarily going that much further east…

"But it’s very, very important that these are good Championships.

"And we are delivering these Championships as the first in our sustainability strategy to 2030. So that means sustainable and environmental approaches, in terms of waste management, to food catering, to heating, to green transport.

"All these things represent an important development for us and we will use these Championships as a yardstick for future editions."

Asked by insidethegames what the big goal would be for this year’s World Championships back in Europe following the catalysing efforts Stateside, Coe responded: "It is about quality, quality, quality. I’m unashamed about this. The World Championships needs to be seen as being about the best of the best.

"I know there’s been some conjecture of late about the size of teams and delegations. I am less concerned about that and more concerned about the quality of the people we take…

"We are different from the Olympic Games. We are World Athletics, and these are our Championships, and when people watch they need to know they are watching the best. That will be an element in our thinking going forwards."

Coe said the new competition that is currently being finalised and will be introduced to the programme in 2026 would follow such an ethos more stringently with a  view to fitting in with TV coverage.

"I envisage this as two or three nights of high quality athletics which focuses on the best of the best,” he said.

"These won’t be huge fields, there won’t be heats.

"This will be an action-packed two or three days, and unashamedly it will be designed for television."

Asked if he would countenance investment from a country such as Saudi Arabia to take the sport "to the next level."

"My default position is that investment from any country or any sector looking to come into our sport would be looked at very carefully," he said.

"Our Executive Board has said no to certain sectors and in the past we’ve said 'no' to certain countries.

"We can only make that judgement when we get to it.

“We have made judgements in the past.

“Our Executive Board has said no to certain sectors and in the past we’ve said no to certain countries.

“One thing I would always say is that I can’t think of any occasion in the last four or five decades where I have sensed that a sport has left a country in worse shape politically, culturally or socially, than when it went there.

“Sometimes those changes are always immediate; sometimes they’re not going to be within your tenure.

“But sport does have the ability to flick the dial - and it’s not always that obvious to start with.

“So I’d think you’d look at that and you’d want to ask some pretty serious questions about what is their approach around things that matter to us as a sport - human rights, gender balance, inclusion, all those things would be taken into consideration.

“That’s the world we live in."

Returning to the event in hand, Coe added: "I’ve never been more optimistic about the quality of our sport. You’ve only got to run through 20 names that I couldn’t have named even five years ago. So the sport has progressed massively in the last few years.

"And interestingly it’s come off the back of probably the toughest period for the athletes, who have had to show such resilience and forbearance in order to get through lockdown before getting back to some competitions without crowds.

"And an Olympic Games in an empty stadium which was actually, looking back, probably unnecessary at the time.

"What do I want in Budapest? I want the best of the best to shine. I want big, indelible moments that people can take away in exactly the same way that they did in 1991 when they were saying do you remember the Carl Lewis/Mike Powell long jump competition?

"You want those big moments. I want a whole cluster of those. I want the Karsten Warholm moment, I want the Keely Hodgkinson-Athing Mu moment.

"And we’ve got Faith Kipyegon of course - there’s nothing more I can actually say about her at the moment. It’s extraordinary that we will have her in the stadium off the back of having re-written women’s endurance running.

"These are the big moments that people will remember. That is why we are excited about Budapest."