IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch's love and knowledge of sport was unsurpassed

Since my early teens, my life has been inextricably bound to sport, whether competitive, political or administrative. And there are two people to whom I owe an eternal debt of gratitude.

One was my father, who steered my career from its first tentative steps to an Olympic stadium. The other, Juan Antonio Samaranch, who left us on Wednesday, had an equally profound influence on a large part of my sporting landscape.

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In 1981 I was invited by Samaranch, who only a year earlier had become the International Olympic Committee's seventh president, to attend the Olympic congress in Baden Baden alongside a clutch of other competitors. As ever, with the sixth sense of a seasoned sailor seizing upon a changing wind – long before anyone else – he knew that the athlete had to be at the epicentre of the decisions being made on their behalf by sporting organisations.

Up until this point, although they were often the first thought, they were, in essence, the last consideration. As a sports leader, Samaranch was different. He knew instinctively that if the movement were to modernise, it could only do so by taking the athletes with him on that journey.

At the end of the conference I was asked to present a synthesis of our deliberations. Shortly afterwards, he announced the formation of the first Athletes' Commission – ostensibly made up from those of us in Baden Baden. Thomas Bach, Pal Schmitt and Kip Keino were among those who went on to reach the upper echelons of administrative sport in their own countries and the IOC. There were many more who now hold prominent positions in international federations and even government, who all owe those posts to the foresight of the Catalan. Within a few years, the Athletes' Commission was an integral part of most international federations.

Shortly after joining the Athletes' Commission I was appointed to the UK Sports Council and not, of course, without asking his opinion first – and he was always on hand and generous with his time.

It was this friendship that probably persuaded him to offer me a wild card after being dropped from the British team for the 1988 Games in Seoul. For understandable reasons, the British Olympic Association did not welcome this overture from Lausanne with unalloyed joy. In the end, I sat out the Games as a spectator.

At the Atlanta Games six years after I'd retired, buried in a political career and with less day-to-day contact with sport, he invited me to watch the 1500 metres final with him. At the end of the evening, he turned to me and, with a clipped command, announced he was leaving and that I should follow. We were ushered from the stadium and arrived at the basketball venue, the Georgia Dome, for the Dream Team v Yugoslavia final. At half-time, again he told me to follow. We disappeared into the bowels of the stadium, only to reappear on the apron of the court.

A few moments later, he presented Muhammad Ali with the gold medal that he supposedly threw away after winning the Olympic heavyweight crown in Rome, when refused service in a restaurant in his hometown. It was a moment I will never forget. In the car returning to the hotel, I asked him whose idea it was. He smiled and with clear pride said, "It was mine".

At the end of last summer, I sat with him in Spain. In his 90th year his grasp of not just international sport but the global condition was breathtaking. There was always that disarming moment when you thought you were imparting information that was fresh, only to be politely told that he'd known at least six months earlier. And you knew he did.

He had the rare quality of grasping granular detail but never letting it get in the way of the broader vision. He was quite simply the most intuitive politician I have ever met.

He pulled the movement together after the Moscow boycott and moulded it into the powerful global movement it is today – reducing dramatically the potential for further damage in the tit for tat boycott in Los Angeles and, again, holding the rings so astutely during the Seoul Games, staged in a country recognised by less than half the diplomatic world, which is testimony alone to that assertion.

But what many of his chroniclers miss was his sheer love and encyclopedic knowledge of sport. As a spectator his concentration was total. His knowledge of the current crop of competitors and their form was astonishing. And that was the same in almost every Olympic sport.

It will come as no surprise when I write that the first person I went to see after being appointed chairman of the London 2012 bid team was this man. "Of course you have to do it," he said impatiently. "You have a responsibility."

Then a short pause, "of course, you're not going to win". This was not the occasion to push my luck, particularly as Madrid were also in the running.

Just before our first Athletes' Commission meeting, nearly 30 years ago, he briefly addressed the group, "I want you all to challenge me, to challenge the movement and to challenge sport". Much has been written about his presidency, events chronicled and analysed. He led from the front and he unquestionably challenged us all. I shall miss him.

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