The city, and the venue of Arena Birmingham - or the National Indoor Arena, as it was known until 2014 - have already proved themselves capable twice over of hosting highly successful international indoor championships.

In 2003, the Second City became the first city in the United Kingdom to host the World Indoor Championships.  

A United States sprinter named Justin Gatlin won the 60 metres title by some distance.  Home athlete Marlon Devonish, who would win Olympic sprint relay gold a year later, won the 200m, while in the 3,000m Ethiopia's Haile Gebrselassie, a regular record breaker on that blue track, helped himself to a gold medal.

The women’s events included a huge triple jump win for local athlete Ashia Hansen, who had to reach beyond 15 metres to wrest the title from Francoise Mbango Etone, another Olympic champion in waiting, after she had set a Cameroon record of 14.88m with her first attempt.

Four years later the same Arena hosted the European Indoor Championships.  

Britain’s Jason Gardener won his fourth European 60m title despite the nagging worry of whether his wife, Nancy, was about to give birth to their second  child during the competition. Her timing was also impeccable.

Belgian women excelled themselves as Kim Gevaert  won her third 60m title and Tia Hellebaut - who would go on to take the gold medal at the following year’s Olympic Games in Beijing – earned her only indoor title with an extraordinary effort of 2.05m, which remained her highest mark until she retired.

Hellebaut’s effort was one of the stand-out performances of recent indoor championships, and I counted it a privilege to be there witnessing it.

But it cannot compete with the indoor performance that still stands top of my personal list. Venue: Paris. Year: 1997. Event: IAAF World Indoors. Athlete: Wilson Kipketer.

This wasn’t a final, merely a Friday night heat of the men’s 800m ahead of the weekend’s main attractions in the cavernous Palais Omnisports in Bercy.

Nothing much was expected; something extraordinary was delivered. A massive world record.

Kipketer, Kenyan-born, had missed the previous year’s Olympics because his new Danish nationality had not been established for long enough. Despite this, he had finished the year unbeaten, with all three medallists from Atlanta 1996 among those he had vanquished, and had run to within 0.1 seconds of Sebastian Coe’s 1981 world record of 1min 41.73sec.

One of the best things about indoor athletics is the proximity to the action. You can hear the athletes’ feet thumping on the boards. But Kipketer, with a gazelle’s tread, glid round. It was mesmeric.

He took an immediate lead and then drew smoothly away from the labouring mortals behind him. By the time he crossed the line he was so far ahead he might have been finishing a 10,000m race - and that time was 1min 43.96sec, almost a second inside the world record previously set by Kenya’s Paul Ereng, the 1988 Olympic champion. What!!??

It was the first world record to have been set in the first round of an individual event at any World Championships.

Afterwards, Kipketer - an amiable but enigmatic character - said he had only decided to enter the Championships a month earlier, and insisted that when he had taken to the track he had no plan to make an immediate attack on Ereng's eight-year-old mark of 1:44.84.

All that apparently changed as he glanced up at the huge screen after his first 200 metres and noticed his split time of 25 seconds.

"When I saw that, and nobody was following me, I thought - OK, I have to go for it," Kipketer said.

Asked if he was surprised to have taken such a large amount off the record, which carried an automatic bonus of $50,000 (£35,000/€40,000), he replied, with a broad grin: "I didn't know I was going to break the world record, so yes, I was surprised. But I was also not surprised because I have been training in the United States for two months with my coach, Mike Boit, and I knew I was in very good shape."

Kipketer went out of his way to thank his Polish coach, Slavomir Novak, who revealed later that he had indeed persuaded his charge to enter only a month earlier, but that the new indoor mark was something they had discussed.

Whatever the exact truth, it didn’t particularly matter. What was extraordinary was the sense of an athlete operating with such apparent ease at such a rarified athletic level.

But the other unique element on that Friday night was the hope, almost the certainty, that Kipketer could and would run even faster before the weekend was done.

Nor were those hopes disappointed. In the final he took more than another whole second off his Friday best, crossing in 1:42.67.

The same calculations were set into operation ahead of the outdoor season. Surely Coe’s mark must go? And surely it did, as Kipketer first equalled the mark, then reduced it to 1:41.24, and again to 1:41.11 - a record which stood just short of 13 years until another Kenyan marvel named David Rudisha made his mark.

That Friday night performance in Paris, however, remains a timeless marvel.