I missed Marius Vizer's explosive speech on 20 April 2015 because I had spotted one of these gloriously distinctive birds, improbably exotic-looking for dowdy old Europe, beside the perimeter fence of the Sochi ExpoCentre and crept off to investigate further.

By the time I had cleared security, it was all over. Despite flying two and half thousand miles through a Caucasus storm to be there, I had managed to miss the most unexpectedly dramatic skirmish of the century so far in the perennial tussle for power and influence over the international sports ecosystem.

As I struggled to catch up, I was told about an address so hard-hitting and combative by SportAccord's then President that it prompted some delegates to glance up from their Blackberries. On more than one occasion.

"This is war," muttered a journalist colleague, cutting to the chase. A couple of greybeards reminisced knowingly about someone called Thomi Keller - a name that was new to me at the time, but whom I subsequently found myself writing a book about.

Seven-and-a-half years later, it has come to this: a vote on the dissolution of the Global Association of International Sports Federations (GAISF) - as SportAccord was renamed in 2017 in a nod to its past - by its ninety-some full members in the Olympic capital Lausanne on Tuesday (November 29).

The big beasts of the International Federations (IFs) and the Olympic Movement have vied for control of their domain ever since, well, ever since IFs became a thing more than a century ago, once long-distance travel became less arduous and, eventually, normalised. GAISF, the IF umbrella body with the widest reach, has been a key battleground. Sometimes, as now, the main players have had a foot in both camps.

Undoubtedly the pithiest comment I noted down in the aftermath of Vizer's call on International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach - there present in the audience - to "stop blocking the SportAccord strategy" came from John Boulter, a former Adidas executive.

As the footwear man explained: "The whole organisation of sport is set up to create a tension between whoever is representing the IFs, the National Olympic Committees (NOCs) and the IOC. There are three different groups trying to do not quite the same thing, but they all want money and they all have some justification for saying, 'We are the people on whom it all depends.'"

He did add that, while it was always there, the tension was usually creative. Let's just say that dramatic day in Sochi was an exception.

Since its foundation, just as international sport was beginning its development into a multibillion-dollar business, in 1967, there had been one other GAISF/SportAccord leader who had sought to stand up vigorously to the IOC. This was Keller.

For the bulk of the 1970s, he was probably a more influential figure among fellow sports leaders than Lord Killanin, then the IOC President.

This was a period when international sport was like a formerly impoverished country which has just struck oil. Everyone knew that the sector looked set to become considerably richer - I don’t think anyone suspected how rich; yet no-one could be sure of the precise effects the new streams of cash would have.

The IOC went into this new era broke, like everyone else. The IFs had high hopes for the single-sport world championships that were beginning to pop up, with help from an energetic young sports marketing innovator called Patrick Nally. It was not yet a given that the World Cup and the Summer Olympics would consolidate their status as the two great sports mega-events, dwarfing the earning power of other properties and, soon enough, vesting great power in the hands of FIFA, the IOC and the men who ran them.

Juan Antonio Samaranch, the Spaniard who replaced Killanin as IOC President in 1980, was quicker than most to sense the way the wind was blowing. Once he was sure of himself, he wasted little time in cutting Keller and GAISF down to size.

As he explained to David Miller, the journalist and Olympic historian: "We had the means to destroy him, and did so. Without the television money, the proportion for the Olympic federations coming from the Games, GAISF was finished… It was important for the IOC to win this battle."

Keller's successor as GAISF President, the South Korean Kim Un-yong, duly changed the umbrella body's policy, as he later told me, to "collaboration with the IOC".

Having won the key battle rather bloodlessly, Samaranch saw no harm, seemingly, in letting GAISF soldier on in its new, more emollient guise. According to Boulter, when he asked whether the IOC President felt that the modest but vital financial support provided by his company to GAISF should continue, he replied: "Yes, as long as my friend Dr Kim is President, you should help them - but not too much."

Boulter's boss, Horst Dassler, it should be added, had been a source of sound, business-minded advice to the IOC President in his early years in the hot seat.

Vizer, who was and remains President of the International Judo Federation, had plenty of friends in high places. But he could only dream of the sort of power inside sport which Keller wielded in his 1970s heyday.

Bach's alleged "blocking" of SportAccord/GAISF's strategy was more akin to nipping an unruly shoot in the bud.

It is only natural to wonder whether GAISF would today be on the brink of dissolution had Patrick Baumann, who took over as President in 2016 and imbued what was still SportAccord with its new/old name and a dinky new logo, lived.

He ruled cautiously and appeared not to take the slightest chance that a new contretemps with Bach might arise. (Like Kim - but unlike Keller or Vizer - he was an IOC member, and thought to be destined for greater things.)

Then again, it was programmed under a novel rotating Presidency system, that Baumann was to make way for a new GAISF President in 2020.

The IOC's financial dominance over the international sports landscape is now such that any show of defiance is potentially hazardous. Sure, most Olympic IFs have worthwhile revenue streams above and beyond their Olympic Games dividends. But only FIFA could happily forgo this payment and not even notice the impact. For most - though not all - non-Olympic IFs, meanwhile, a place on the Games programme would be transformative in terms of both finance and exposure, you might say a dream come true.

If GAISF members do push ahead and imbibe the hemlock on Tuesday, their action ought to be viewed in this context.

The world is well-imbued with IF umbrella bodies - so much so that outside observers could be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about.

But none is as broad - and therefore as potentially influential on matters on which most IFs agree - as GAISF. Moreover, two of them - the Association of Summer Olympic International Federations (ASOIF) and the Association of Winter Olympic International Federations (AIOWF) - are the very bodies shepherded into existence by Samaranch to implement the strategy of divide and rule which emasculated Keller's GAISF in the first place. The lesser umbrella bodies, moreover, divvy up their members in accordance with their place in the Olympic sports hierarchy, a tacit acknowledgement that this is the natural order of things.

Bearing in mind Boulter's worldly-wise point about the three groups trying to do "not quite the same thing", meanwhile, it is well worth reiterating that the IOC moved recently to squeeze the Association of National Olympic Committees (ANOC), the NOC umbrella body, and a power-base in the past for influential kingmakers such as Mexico's Mario Vázquez Raña and Sheikh Ahmad Al-Fahad Al-Sabah of Kuwait.

The lever, of course, is IOC cash. ANOC's IOC "subvention" for the 2021-2024 cycle is to be slashed by 70 per cent compared with the previous quadrennium. 

As GAISF waits for consignation to the condemned cell, it is hard to believe that the IOC inner circle has ever been more comprehensively in charge of the universe it seeks to command.

I cannot help wondering though whether its triumph will turn out to be somewhat pyrrhic.

Why do I say this? Well, ask yourselves who outside the narrow circle of those directly affected will even notice the outcome of Tuesday's voting.

Hardly anyone, I would suggest. Why? Because they will be watching the World Cup. And those who aren't will be playing Grand Theft Dinosaur Fortnite on their devices.

Things can change. They have - markedly - over the past 10 years. But for now multi-sports Games - which demand so much of their host cities - are increasingly taking on the air of life-support systems for sports at risk of withering away.

The other thing worth underlining is that it is a jungle out there. This power struggle which the IOC is winning for now is a constant. The moment potential rivals sense a weakness, they will revert to a more offensive strategy.

When that day comes, there will probably be a call for an IF body prepared to prosecute its members' rights as vigorously as GAISF did at certain moments in its history. Someone, you can be sure, will step up to the plate. What precise acronym this challenger will fish out from international sport's fathomless alphabet soup of federations and associations, it is impossible to foretell. But GAISF may turn out to have hydra-like qualities.