OBITUARY: Juan Antonio Samaranch, former IOC President

LEGACY: Juan Antonio Samaranch was arguably the most powerful figure in world sport during his tenure as president of the International Olympic Committee (Getty Images)

If de Courbetin was the father of the modern Olympics, Samaranch was the architect of the 21st century Games - an era where success isn't just measured in gold, silver and bronze but where prudence dictates and reality demands that dollars and ratings are just as important.

While chiefly remembered for his years as ringmaster, he spent a lifetime around the five-ringed circus, serving as sports minister in Franco's reviled Fascist government, the criticism of which he never escaped, and chef de mission of the Spanish team at Olympics during the 1970s.

But he will forever be defined by his two decades as the most powerful - and frequently feared - man in world sport.

Whatever your thoughts about Samaranch, he was certainly committed to the Olympic movement, although it also helped him enjoy a five-star lifestyle and preferential treatment usually only the preserve of world leaders.

The first Games he presided over as International Olympic Committee president in 1980 couldn't be more different from the last Games - 20 years later in Sydney.

While traditionalists might hanker for the old days of his predecessor, Lord Killanin, when all competitors were Corinthian spirited amateurs, Samaranch's desire for the best athletes to compete at the Games forced through an acceptance of professional sportsmen.

And if you needed evidence why that change only benefitted the IOC, you need look no further than the ice hockey final at this year's Winter Olympics in Vancouver, a pulsating clash between the multi-millionaire NHL stars of Canada and the United States.

The very best in their sport competing on the biggest stage there is.

On taking the job, the IOC's finances were in crisis - it's hard to think, considering the multi-million pound business that surrounds the election of Olympic host cities, but back then no-one wanted to stage a show that only guaranteed crippling debts and negligible returns.

Samaranch signed off the hugely successful and now much imitated TOP sponsorship programme - which raised nearly $1 billion in the last Olympic cycle - and helped negotiate new broadcasting deals that have only spiralled upwards (NBC paid $2 billion to screen Vancouver 2010 and the forthcoming London 2012 Games in North America).

But such riches brought the spectre of corruption and Samaranch's achievements will forever be rightly offset by the fall-out after the election of Salt Lake City as hosts of the 2002 Winter Olympics, when several members were exposed, censored or expelled for accepting cash bribes in return for their votes.

His tenure will also be remembered for the doping scandals on his watch - from the institutionalised doping of the Soviet bloc to Ben Johnson's steroid-fuelled fall from grace in Seoul - and his reticence to move decisively against the cheats, until they damage they had done was almost irreversible.