August 24 - Amid shambolic scenes here, Sergey Bubka kept his place as vice-president of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), along with London 2012 chairman Sebastian Coe, having earlier in the day thought his chances of succeeding Lamine Diack as President had suffered a huge blow.
The vote had been re-run after technical problems with the electronic voting system had emerged earlier in the day at the world governing body's Congress during the election for the treasurer.
Following what IAAF general secretary Pierre Weiss described as "crisis talks" during the lunch break, the electronic system was abandoned and a manual method used instead. But only after there had been a further delay when a photocopier being used to prepare voting papers broke down.
Each of the 200 countries was then called up one-by-one to cast their votes into the ballot box - a marathon process that would have left even Paula Radcliffe feeling exhausted.
The re-run followed the stunning moment when Bubka had polled only 118 of the 199 votes in the election for the vice-president and was the one out of the five candidates who failed to get one of the four places.
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Even after it was held again, confusion continued with the scrutineers initially having to try to reconcile a discrepancy of two votes and needed to do a recount, which took nearly an hour.
In the end Bubka, the 1988 Olympic pole vault champion and world-record holder, who is considered the rising star of sports administration, had his political ambitions rekindled by scraping through as the fourth of the five candidates.
The biggest loser in the re-run [Canadian Abby] Hoffman, who polled only 122 votes in the second ballot, which was topped by Hersh with 175.
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It was hardly a day when the IAAF reinforced its claim to be the number one Olympic sport and showed that it was a forward-thinking organisation.
But Diack claimed it had no reason to feel ashamed. "I'm not embarrassed by the election," he said. "Technology has failed us and we had to go back to manual voting. This was just a technical glitch and we just have to live with it."
Others were less forgiving of the situation. "I've won General Elections and I've lost General Elections in about a quarter of the time," said Coe, tongue firmly in cheek.
The person with the most reason to complain was Hoffman, who thought she had been elected as the IAAF's first female vice-president only to have it cruelly snatched it away. "The whole election process was a pretty messy affair," she told insidethegames.
The 64-year-old Canadian 1966 Commonwealth Games 880 yards champion and former director general of Sports Canada did not buy into the theory that she had only been elected initially thanks to the electronic voting system.
"Whatever the dynamics was underpinning the elections in the morning, when I had enough votes to be elected, it was a completely different dynamic in the afternoon," she said. "The reality is that the one [election] in the afternoon was the one that counted. But I'm not happy obviously about how things unfolded during the day."
Hoffman believes that once reality set in among the delegates that they had voted in a woman ahead of such a high-profile figure as Bubka it led to a change of mind. "Some people could say that the idea of having a female vice-president seemed like a good idea but when the prospect of it became a reality it wasn't so appealing," she said.
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