The announcement of the additional sports for Los Angeles 2028 has been postponed, but the Olympic prospects of cricket will hardly be harmed by the buzz in the city as the International Cricket Council (ICC) men's World Cup forms a lively backdrop.

Mumbai was confirmed as host of the Session shortly before the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics and represents another element in increasing the engagement of the sub-continent with the Olympic world.

The Session in Mumbai is set to be only the second one to be held on Indian soil.

Forty years ago, the meetings were held in New Delhi.

Many of the decisions made then paved the way for a more modern Olympics with greater commercialisation at the door.

It was also the session where the proposed structure of the fledgling Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) was presented.

New Delhi had been chosen to host the 1983 Session ahead of East Berlin and Olympic visitors were promised "a city with a glorious past and a vibrant present" in a message from organisers in Olympic Review.

"A firm base has been created for encouraging sports in this country. I can assure you, in this context, that India will always remain an enthusiastic champion of the Olympic movement and an ardent believer in the Olympic spirit," India's President Zail Singh told IOC members as he formally opened proceedings.

Their numbers had been swelled by the addition of Peru’s Ivan Dibos, a businessman and former rower, Olympic slalom silver medallist Chick Igaya of Japan and Mary Glen-Haig, a British fencer.

Glen-Haig became only the third female member of the IOC.

Earlier, the Olympic Order in gold had been conferred on a woman for the first time.

The recipient was Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

"I express the greatest pleasure of having amongst us such distinguished personalities," Mrs Gandhi said as she received the award.

"The honour really belongs to the youth of the country, without whose hard work, India would not have found a place on the world map."  

The IOC President at the time was Juan Antonio Samaranch.

"It is extremely rewarding for all of us to see that a large and immense country like India lays such particular emphasis on sports activities," Samaranch told the meetings.

Samaranch had been elected IOC President during the troubled Moscow 1980 Olympics.

The United States, West Germany, Japan, Canada and other nations had boycotted the Games in protest at the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan in 1979.

"The past four years have been very busy ones for the IOC, and will certainly prove in the future to have marked the beginning of a new era in our history," Samaranch asserted.

"In 1980, we were confronted with our greatest challenge since our creation in 1894, but by 1981, with the holding of the extremely successful Olympic Congress in Baden-Baden, we have been able to reassert our strength and reinforce our unity and independence."

From the start, Samaranch had made it clear that he considered the IOC Presidency to be a full-time position and moved to Lausanne.

He also set about travelling to as many National Olympic Committees as possible.

Samaranch had also visited the 1982 Asian Games in New Delhi, after which Indian officials had revealed their willingness to bid for the 1992 Olympics.

"I was extremely happy to learn that New Delhi is seriously considering the possibility of bidding for the organisation of the Games of the XXVth Olympiad in 1992," Samaranch declared.

"Indeed, India would have little to accomplish as far as sports constructions are concerned, as I have seen for myself."

Ultimately, New Delhi's candidacy was withdrawn in March 1986, a few months before the final vote, won by Barcelona, the city where Samaranch had been born.

During the New Delhi Session, organisers of the Winter Games in Sarajevo and the Los Angeles Olympics (LAOOC) presented their latest updates.

In those days, both Winter and Summer Games were held in the same calendar year.

LAOOC President Peter Ueberroth attracted some criticism in the media for his absence from the Session, but the Americans brought with them a specially recorded video message from United States President Ronald Reagan.

In this, Reagan undertook to respect the Olympic Charter.

The IOC agreed that a demonstration competition in baseball would be permitted, but although medals were to be awarded, it was stressed that these would not be Olympic medals.

The regulations for the Olympic football tournament had also been agreed, although teams from Europe and South America were restricted to players who had not participated in the FIFA World Cup.

There was also uncertainty over the location for the shooting competition.

A change to Olympic protocol seemed to anticipate potential political problems to come.

A proposal from Samaranch himself recommended "that the athlete taking the oath at the Opening Ceremony of the Games should henceforth swear on the Olympic flag and not the flag of his country".

At this stage it was still expected that the Soviet bloc would travel to Los Angeles 1984, but the death of leader Yuri Andropov shortly before the Sarajevo Winter Olympics foreshadowed a change of attitudes.

The older, more hard-line Konstantin Chernenko took over and the Soviet Politburo pushed for a retaliatory boycott of the 1984 Games as the cold war escalated once again. 

The idea to establish CAS had been proposed by Samaranch himself the previous year,

For the Session in New Delhi, Judge Keba M’Baye, a Senegalese lawyer, gave a detailed report on how the CAS might look when it was established,

CAS was to have 40 permanent members.

The IOC, National Olympic Committees and International Federations would each nominate ten and the IOC President would be empowered to choose a further ten from outside the Olympic family with the specification that "each member having some juridical training".

In his presentation, M’Baye set out 74 proposed statutes for the new body.

"The CAS can give an opinion on any juridical question concerning the practice of sport or its development and in a general way, all activities pertaining to sport."

In New Delhi, the IOC agenda also included an item on "New Sources of Financing", another idea initiated by Samaranch.

The working group was chaired by IOC Vice-President Louis Girandou N’Diaye.

"The IOC was seeking new sources of financing to help the NOCs and thus strengthen the Olympic Family, out of the 151 NOCs recognised by the IOC very few succeeded in obtaining sizeable revenues," N’Diaye reported to the Executive Board.

"A number of proposals had been studied, the most interesting of which was from a Swiss agency specialised in commercialisation," IOC minutes said.

A similar template to that which had been developed for FIFA was drawn up by Swiss marketing company International Sports Leisure (ISL) which drew on the expertise of Japanese marketing giants Dentsu and advertising specialists McCann Erickson, Lintas and Campbell Ewald.

Little more than a year later, the IOC had taken the plunge into full blown marketing and sponsorship deals which licensed the Olympic Rings and other emblems and invited major companies to become official partners of the Olympics.

This was named The Olympic Partner (TOP) programme.

The IOC were already planning the expansion of Olympic headquarters in Lausanne with a modern annex set to connect to the Château de Vidy and the building of a new Olympic museum elsewhere in the city.

Yet, delegates in Mumbai may well find themselves also paying silent thanks for one of the less publicised decisions made in 1983 after a suggestion by Samaranch.

The IOC President himself "proposed that smoking from now onwards be forbidden during the session meetings".

His proposal was accepted by a show of hands.