Its now 40 years since the inaugural World Athletics Championships took place in Helsinki. As Ben Bloom discovers, their birth was not only reactionary, but revolutionary

handful of years ago, while wading through old artefacts in preparation for the launch of World Athletics heritage department, an employee at the sports governing body stumbled across some dusty scrapbooks.

The contents related to 1983, when the inaugural World Championships were held in Helsinki. The rudimentary nature of the official documentation spoke volumes of the state of the sport at that time.

Our headquarters back then were in London and someone from head office had clearly just walked into WHSmith and bought a number of scrapbooks to stick in newspaper articles from the World Championships, says Chris Turner, World Athletics heritage director.

The report is very, very basic nothing was typed. Its a lovely document to see but it shows just how much everything was in its infancy.

As the sport prepares to celebrate the 40th anniversary of those first World Championships with the events 19th edition in Budapest this month, those scrapbooks provide a pertinent reminder of just how much has changed in a short period of time.

Until 1973, when it was gifted what became the World Cross Country Championships, the governing body did not own, operate or organise a single competition. Indeed, it had no revenue beyond what it received through the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and its annual global development budget prior to the launch of the World Cup in 1977 was a paltry $15,000.

The instigator of radical change was Dutchman Adriaan Paulen, only the third person to be president of the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) as World Athletics was formerly known in the organisations 64-year history. It was time to drag an amateur sport into a professional era.

For an old gentleman, Paulen was pretty visionary and very young in terms of what he thought about the sport and where he thought it should go, says Turner. Could the launch of the World Championships have happened under his predecessor Lord Burghley? Im not so sure. He had a very traditional way of looking at sport.

Paulen was the joining factor between the old regime and what was to come under Primo Nebiolo [Paulens successor as president], who was very much a businessman. The legacy of what we have today was changed by Paulen. Its amazing how quickly things changed.

Over one weekend at that inaugural 1977 World Cup in Dusseldorf, the sports governing body made an enormous $1.5m profit.

Emboldened, Paulen set about breaking a long association that had seen Olympic winners given the de facto title of world champion by launching a standalone World Championships.

In 1983 after two small-scale World Championships solely for non-Olympic disciplines the sport descended on Helsinki for its first proper edition.

We were born with the Olympic movement and it was part of our constitution that our World Championships were ingrained in the Olympic Games, says Turner. Its odd to reflect nowadays with all the reserves they have, but the IOC were effectively bankrupt then.

They would have been very worried. They had no money and then their major sport was launching its own independent World Championships. Thats an earthquake in terms of the Olympic movement at the time.

If Paulen was the vision behind the project, sports marketer Patrick Nally was the person who brought it to life. Through his West Nally company, formed with BBC commentator Peter West, Nally had begun shaping the sports business industry by introducing large-scale sponsors, flooding the landscape with cash. The 1983 World Championships would become his next project.

We were writing the rules from a clean sheet of paper because it had never been done before, Nally told World Athletics earlier this year. It was extraordinarily exciting. The buzz of seeing a meeting of that calibre for the first time outside an Olympics was amazing.

I would probably put it as one of the most rewarding events I had the privilege of being involved with from the beginning.

The eventual success of those eight days in Helsinki was aided by a succession of blighted Olympics during the period: the terrorist attack of Munich 1972, the African boycott of Montreal 1976, the United States boycott of Moscow 1980 and the Eastern Bloc response at Los Angeles 1984. It meant the 1983 World Championships were the only truly global, peaceful gathering of athletes at the time.

It was history in the making, recalls Fatima Whitbread, who won javelin silver. Without competing against the best, youre never going to know how you rank against the rest. I was delighted when they launched the competition.

More than 1300 athletes from 153 countries competed at those inaugural World Championships, which produced some unforgettable moments.

Carl Lewis was the standout act with his triple gold (100m, long jump and 4x100m), while Jarmila Kratochvilova won the 400m and 800m, Mary Decker the 1500m and 3000m, Marita Koch claimed three golds and a silver and Sergey Bubka won the first of six consecutive pole vault world titles.

From a British perspective, reigning Olympic and European decathlon champion Daley Thompson won gold despite missing much of the year through injury, and Steve Cram claimed the 1500m title.

Whitbreads silver was one of five minor British medals, earned in the most dramatic fashion when Finlands home favourite Tiina Lillak snatched the host nations only gold with her last throw. It was the perfect discipline in which to triumph for a country with a strong javelin pedigree.

Of all the places the World Championships was going to go to outside of Greece, Finland was it, says Turner, of the decision to award the competition to Helsinki. They had hosted a very successful 1971 European Championships, which had heralded a revival of Finnish athletics, and they were investing in sport after going through two decades of a lull in their success.

They came to the IAAF and said they wanted to make it work. They always said they would make it happen.

Having taken over from Paulen as IAAF president in 1981, Italian Nebiolo who would prove one of the more controversial sporting administrators continued athletics drive for professionalisation and self-sufficiency, with the World Championships becoming biennial after the third edition in Tokyo in 1991. By Gothenburg 1995, 13 corporate sponsors were on board and the sport was unrecognisable from that which Paulen had taken over almost two decades prior.

A lot of people thought that, in terms of stature, the World Championships should remain every four years, adds Turner. But in terms of finance it was a win-win for the IAAF, the sport, and money to develop the sport.

It has basically thrived ever since. Ive never come across even an inkling of somebody putting a proposal to rival it. It is the elite of the world.

We have more athletes and more nations at the World Championships than the Olympic Games. Its difficult to argue against the history of the Olympics but, in terms of representation and beating the best in the world, it is the World Championships.