Olympic games historians were yesterday assessing the contribution of Lord Killanin whose death on Sunday, at the age of 84, closed an epoch in the evolution of the movement.

Killanin, probably the best known Irishman of his generation whose influence outside the country frequently ran in inverse proportion to his relatively muted profile inside it, headed the International Olympic Committee for just eight years.

Sandwiched between the autocratic reign of the American millionaire, Avery Brundage, and the vaguely stained stewardship of Juan Antonio Samaranch, it would be easy to dismiss his presidency as a mere inter regnum.

Yet, in his time in charge, his was the sanguine influence which enabled the Olympic movement to straddle perhaps its most traumatic period since Pierre de Coubertin revived the modern Games at Athens in 1896.

Within days of winning the election to succeed Brundage in Munich in 1972, he shared in the collective anguish of the massacre of Israeli athletes. Four years later, when the boycott of the Montreal festival by black African nations, plunged the Games into a new crisis, it was his sensitive handling which headed off a potentially mortal schism in the world's biggest social movement.

He was not to know it then but the 1980 Games in Moscow would spawn even greater problems after Afghanistan was used as a convenient excuse to expand the cold war between Washington and Moscow into sport and justify America's withdrawal from the festival.

The monument to Killanin's career is that, betrayed by his own government, he still resisted the most intense international pressures to compromise and stood resolute in his decision that the Games would go ahead, with or without American involvement.

In a sense, history had fitted him for that role, for his involvement in the Olympic movement derived primarily from the fractious state of Irish athletics in 1948 when the spectacle of two separate Irish teams being entered for the London Games, one by the Irish Olympic Council and the other by the AAUE, was a cause of open embarrassment for many Irish people.

In an attempt to bring some semblance of respectability to the Council's tarnished image, the late Paddy Carroll sought to find a person of stature who could not be identified even remotely with either of the two warring factions, the AAUE and the NACA, to head up the organisation. Killanin, whose only sporting involvement to that point amounted to a spot of boxing and rowing during his time at Cambridge, fitted that description to the letter.

Although born in London, he was intensely proud of his heritage and within a short time of coming to office, had proved it. It troubled him that the name of Ireland never appeared in the proper title of the teams which had gone to earlier Games under the name of Eire or the Irish Free State.

His solution was to restyle the Irish Olympic Council as the Olympic Council of Ireland. And for the remainder of his time in the Olympic family, he seldom lost an opportunity to promulgate the gospel of a young, vibrant sporting nation.

It wasn't long after his appointment to the IOC in 1952 that this multi-faceted man came to Brundage's attention as the one who might one day succeed him. Lucid and articulate, his contributions were delivered with the ring of authority. And, as his colleagues of the time would recall, a mild stammer merely added to the sense of gravitas.

By the mid-60s, he had been elevated to the role of senior vice-president, the heir apparent to the American who had ruled the Olympic family with an iron fist for the better part of 20 years.

Together with a handful of Irish journalists, I recall being summoned for an informal briefing in a hotel bedroom in Munich where he spelled out his aspirations - and his apprehension - for his pre-stated tenure of office.

Even at that stage, he was fearful of the consequences of an expanded summer festival. By embracing disciplines which did not, could not, come within the ambit of Olympic competition, he felt that the Games would be devalued. He was also particularly sceptical of team events, arguing that the Olympic ideal was all about individual endeavour and the ability of one athlete to pit his or her skills against another.

Vested interests ensured that this ambition perished, as did his efforts to strip the Games of national emblems, anthems and the medals tables which were used to promote political ideologies. Governments which were spending substantial sums in funding teams for the Games were not of a mind to sacrifice the benefits which Olympian profile offered.

He was, however, singularly successful in the biggest objective of all, that of resettling China in the Olympic fold. That represented forward thinking 25 years ago and he lived to see the day when the Orientals would again become an integral part of sport's most lavish presentation.

Killanin's other great passion was the Galway races, of which he was chairman. And there was one occasion during the Montreal Games when the two clashed to present him with a crisis of priorities.

That was the first occasion a rest day was introduced during the track and field programme and he was quick to remind me of its significance. Tongue in cheek, he said: "Of course, you do understand that the real reason for this break with tradition is that nothing can be allowed to take the limelight from the Galway Plate".

At times, he needed that sense of humour to sustain him in the difficult months and weeks preceding the Moscow Games. Shuttle diplomacy hadn't yet found its way into the vernacular when Killanin was commuting on a regular basis to Washington and Moscow and several other of the world's capital cities, in an attempt to break the deepening deadlock over Afghanistan.

Michael Killanin, tall, imposing and fitted by nature to treat with kings, carried the burdens of high office with dignity. But he never lost the ability to reach out across the social divide.

He delighted in retelling the story that within a couple of days of returning from Moscow where he celebrated his 65th birthday, he presented himself at an office in Dublin to apply for his free bus pass. And there, the man whose image had appeared on television and newspapers across the world was required to have his photograph taken for purposes of identification. He recalled with some relish the spectacle of dozens of copies of the picture being rolled off while staff and anybody who happened to be passing by got him to autograph them.

Then, when he eventually emerged from the melee, he found himself being pursued down O'Connell Street by a harassed official who explained that he had been given the wrong colour coded card . . . . and the one he was carrying was for unmarried mothers. That, perhaps, was the perfect illustration of the qualities which enabled him to carry the trappings of high office without sacrificing the common touch.

Of this admirable man who represented his country and the Olympic movement with so much honour, it can be said that when the hard decisions needed to be taken, he didn't shrink. And he did it with a style which was for ever endearing.