He was one of the best boxers of all time, and in the view of many fight fans he was the best.

In his professional career Lewis fought as a Briton, but he had spent several years in Canada as a child and saw out his amateur career under the Canadian flag.

He won his first senior international title as a 20-year-old in the Commonwealth Games - and it was without doubt the easiest win of what would become a stellar career.

It came in Edinburgh in 1986 when Lewis became the first super-heavyweight champion, a weight class that had never been contested before.

When he won Olympic gold in Seoul two years later Lewis had to defeat Riddick Bowe, the American who would also become the undisputed heavyweight champion after turning professional.

In Edinburgh he had to beat Aneurin Evans, one of the luckiest medallists in any sport in the history of the Commonwealth Games, and a man who has never been heard of since.

When the BBC cameras focused on Welshman Evans just before the final began, the legendary boxing commentator Harry Carpenter said: "If I were him I'd be running for my life."

Evans did just that - he spent the next few minutes trying, unsuccessfully, to evade the brutal punches of Lewis.

He survived until 23 seconds into round two, when his corner threw in the towel.

By 1986, Lewis had already fought at the Olympics and won a North American championship. 

Evans had fought only 20 times in his life, and should not even have been in Edinburgh. 

Two days before the Games started there were only two entries in the new super-heavyweight class, Lewis and the Englishman James Oyebola, who had beaten Evans in the ABA final. 

The boycott by African countries, protesting over New Zealand's presence at a time when the All Blacks were still playing rugby against apartheid-era South Africa, hurt boxing more than any other sport.

Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda and Zambia all had strong contenders who stayed at home.

A late rallying call by officials led to Wales nominating Evans, coached by the 1958 Commonwealth bronze medallist Don Braithwaite.

His luck was in: he drew a bye into the final. Lewis made short work of the 6ft 9in Oyebola first, then pounded Evans into submission.

Canada took home half of the 12 boxing golds in Edinburgh.

Lewis was born in London to Jamaican parents, and moved to Ontario with his mother, Violet, for a year.

He returned to London to stay with an aunt, then went back to Canada, aged 12, until he turned professional.

Lewis' elder brother, Dennis, said Lennox was often in trouble in the East End, picked a lot of fights, and "would be in prison or worse" if he had stayed.

In Kitchener, near Toronto, Lewis focused on sport and "turned out to be one of the most beautiful kids", said Violet, who brought him up as a single parent.

Lewis was an outstanding basketball player and a talented footballer and shot-putter, but once he had tried boxing at Arnie Boehm's gym, attached to the Kitchener police headquarters, he was hooked.

He often fought older boys, won six national championships, and went to the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984 at 18.

The money and titles started rolling in when he turned professional, and he enjoyed success after success until his retirement in 2004.

While Lewis went on to world fame after 1986, Evans returned to obscurity in South Wales, and later moved to England.

Oyebola fought as a professional, won the British heavyweight title, and fought on the undercard of a Lewis bill in Atlantic City.

He was killed in 2007.

Working in a London nightclub, Oyebola asked three men to stop smoking, and one of them shot him in the neck.

The killer was jailed for life.

Neroli Fairhall did not know if she would fit on the dais but the size problem was not a matter of weight and girth.

Fairhall was paraplegic, and competed from a wheelchair. She was the first wheelchair athlete to win an able-bodied discipline at any major sporting event, not just the Commonwealth Games.

Athletes with disabilities had won Olympic medals before.

The American-German gymnast George Eyser was run over by a train as a boy and lost a leg, but still won six medals, three of them gold, in St Louis in 1904.

The amputee Hungarian water polo player Oliver Halassy was a triple medallist in the 1920s and 1930s.

Another Hungarian, marksman Karoly Takacs, blew up his shooting hand, his right, with a grenade, then learned to shoot left-handed and won gold in 1948 and 1952.

And Lis Hartel, the Danish rider who was paralysed below both knees by polio, won dressage silvers in 1952 and 1956 and had to be lifted on to the dais for the medal ceremonies.

As the 20th century drew to its end, though, nobody had ever competed, never mind won a medal, from a wheelchair at the Olympic Games or the Commonwealth Games.

Fairhall, who was also the first athlete to take part in both the Paralympics and Olympics - in 1980 and 1984 - won gold in Brisbane in a dramatic finish.

The New Zealander needed three 10-pointers from her last three arrows. "Come on, Neroli, do it!" she exhorted herself.

She did it, to win on countback from the Northern Ireland teenager, Janet Yates.

"After that it was all a bit of a blur," she said.

"Suddenly there were all these New Zealanders there behind me saying 'you've done it!'

"When it came to the ceremony, I was always wary of being lifted into the air, so I sat on the ground."

Fairhall, who had a lifelong love of horses, was confined to a wheelchair after a motorbike accident near her home in Christchurch in 1969.

She lay injured for nearly a day before a passing motorist spotted her.

Despite her ordeal she liked to drive fast, and would often overtake team-mates in her Ford Capri on the way to matches.

After trying and failing at shot, discus, and wheelchair sprinting, Fairhall took up archery.

It was tough but she strengthened her arm and stomach muscles by swimming four times a week, and within a few years she was competing at international level.

People would sometimes complain that it was easier for her to shoot from a sitting position, to which Fairhall's reply was: "I wouldn't know, I've never shot standing up."

Fairhall was selected to represent New Zealand at the 1980 Olympics but missed those Games, to her lifelong regret, when her country boycotted Moscow.

She competed at the Paralympics in The Netherlands that year, setting national and Paralympic records.

When Fairhall made it to the Olympics four years later, in Los Angeles, she finished 35th, a disappointing result.

She would have performed better, she felt, without the constant media attention, something she never liked.

In the early days after her accident, Fairhall felt she was given little or no help in learning how to cope as a paraplegic.

Later in life, Fairthall was a frequent visitor to hospital patients who had suffered serious injuries.

Having been awarded an MBE for services to archery, Fairhall retired from competition in 2001 with "a worn-out left shoulder" and continued to coach and encourage archers.

She died in 2006.

Ruth Dyson, a New Zealand Government Minister, said Fairhall was "an inspirational woman for all New Zealanders who did what many thought was impossible, competing against the best in the Commonwealth to win gold".

"Neroli was an example of how a disabled person can overcome the low expectations of others and achieve excellence," she added.

His work, according to the critics, could not be regarded as literary and has not aged well. His legacy persists, however - in the sporting record books.

When Garvice wrote Her Heart's Desire in 1897 he named the heroine Decima Deane.

A reader in Perth, Western Australia, was so taken with the book that she persuaded a friend to name her daughter Decima.

The child had been christened Clara Norman but, from then on, would be known as Decima.

In time, Decima would become "Dashing Dess", the first female superstar of what would become the Commonwealth Games, and one of Australia's greatest athletes.

Australia won six golds when the Sydney Cricket Ground hosted the 1938 athletics, and five of them went to Dashing Dess, a record that still stands.

When she moved to Sydney in 1939, the year when she equalled the world record for 100 yards, she was feted and photographed wherever she went, and given a newspaper column and a regular slot on radio.

If only she had been born in another part of Australia, Dashing Dess might have been a rival to "The Flying Housewife", Fanny Blankers-Koen, the Dutch heroine of the 1948 Olympic Games who was named female athlete of the century in 1999.

Norman surely had the ability, but the problem was she was on her own.

There was no women's athletic club in Western Australia in the 1920s and early 1930s, and she could not qualify for national selection without a club.

In 1932 she was spotted by a coach, Frank Preston, who saw great potential despite Norman running "like a hen in flight" with her head over her left shoulder and her arms flapping.

Norman was taken aback.

"My leg action was wrong, my arm action was wrong, I did not run sufficiently on my toes, my balance was not good, my breathing had to be corrected, and so on," she said. 

"He pointed out so many faults and corrected me so many times.

"It did not seem possible that a person could have so many faults and still appear a potential champion."

Preston helped to bring about improvement, and Norman also wrote to a top American coach for advice.

She finally got her chance in 1937 when three women's clubs were formed and Western Australia was part of the athletics establishment at last.

At the National Championships in Melbourne she kept winning, and made headlines in all the newspapers.

At the age of 28 Norman was able to show the world what she could do.

For winning the 100 yards, 220 yards, long jump and two relays at the 1938 Games, Norman was "given the sort of ovation at the Sydney Cricket Ground usually reserved for Donald Bradman", according to one report.

That was some achievement, given that Bradman, the greatest cricketer who ever played the game, was at the height of his fame and popularity.

Had war not intervened, Norman would have competed at the Olympic Games planned for Helsinki in 1940.

Had Perth existed on the athletics map a decade earlier, she could have competed internationally many more times.

Dashing Dess was awarded an MBE.

As Clara Hamilton - she reverted to her real forename and married New Zealander Eric Hamilton - she went to Buckingham Palace to receive The Queen's message for the 1982 Brisbane Games.

She was presented with her MBE in Perth in 1983 by Prince Charles, during a royal tour with Princess Diana and their son William.

She died later that year of lung cancer, although she never smoked. 

"People would ask me, 'are you from Tasmania?' because they had never heard of Tanzania," Bayi told the BBC.

"I had to teach some people about geography."

He taught them about running, too, by winning Tanzania's first Commonwealth Games gold medal in any sport in sensational style.

Bayi ran from the front and broke the American Jim Ryun's 1500 metres world record by nearly a second.

"Perhaps the most devastating piece of front-running by any athlete in a middle-distance race," said the British television commentator David Coleman.

But Coleman was underdoing it, according to the world's first sub-four-minute miler Roger Bannister, who said: "That was the greatest run I have ever seen."

It was the last time a world record was broken on the track at the Commonwealth Games and was arguably more impressive than Bannister's 1954 victory over John Landy, which would therefore make it the all-time top achievement in athletics in the near-100-year history of the Games.

Bayi returned to a hero's welcome and continued to serve in the army and as a sport leader.

He won many more races but was denied a chance at Olympic gold in 1976 because of a boycott by African nations.

He has been secretary general of Tanzania's National Olympic Committee for many years, and with his late wife set up the Filbert Bayi Foundation to build schools, develop athletic talent and provide education for disadvantaged children.

Bayi's famous victory came on the same day in February 1974 when Ronnie Biggs - who took part in the Great Train Robbery in Britain in 1963 and was one of the world's most wanted criminals after years on the run - was arrested in Brazil.

Biggs was on the front page of newspapers and Bayi on the back, all over the Commonwealth.

"I'm very proud of the gold medal and the record, and my country is proud of me," Bayi said.

"When I stood on the podium and heard my anthem, my eyes were glistening."

Bayi had been running well in the build-up to the Christchurch Games but was, in his own view, "an underdog".

The favourite was local hero John Walker, who broke the mile world record in 1975 and won Olympic 1500m gold in Montreal in 1976 in Bayi's absence.

Other strong medal contenders were the Kenyans Ben Jipcho and Mike Boit, and another New Zealander, Rod Dixon.

Bayi beat Ryun's world record by 0.9sec in 3min 32.2sec, ahead of Walker who was also inside Ryun's record time.

Third-placed Jipcho ran the fourth fastest 1500m at that time, and Britain's Brendan Foster was five-and-a-half seconds back in seventh place but still broke the British record. 

"It was an amazing race - one of the greatest in history," said Foster.

Not until 1979 did Foster's fellow Briton Seb Coe better Bayi's record.

Looking back at the race, Bayi said: "When I arrived in New Zealand nobody took much notice."

He had led from the front in winning the All-African Games title in Lagos, Nigeria in 1973.

"I felt I would do the same as a front-runner in New Zealand," he said.

"If I ran the way I wanted to they were never going to catch me.

"People thought they would get me in the final 200 metres.

"I was taking it easy, and when John was coming close to me I accelerated in the last 100 metres.

"I jumped up when I saw 'world record' flashing up on the board."

Bayi broke the mile world record in 1975 and would have been a very strong contender in Montreal but for the boycott.

In the Moscow 1980 Olympic Games, when he was 27, Bayi won a silver in the steeplechase.

The David Dixon Award, named after the former honorary secretary of the Commonwealth Games Federation, was presented, in a full stadium at the Closing Ceremony, to the athlete who made the best overall contribution to the Games.

Ian Thorpe, the world's greatest swimmer who had won six golds and a silver, was favourite to win it but he did not.

The Daily Mail takes up the story. "Although the Games finale's final act was drenched in a torrential downpour of trademark Manchester proportions the spirit of the occasion could not be dampened," the newspaper said.

"Natalie du Toit, the 18-year-old South African who lost a leg in a horrific moped accident, was chosen as the most outstanding athlete of the Games.

"The 4,000 competitors voted for Natalie above Aussie swimmer Ian Thorpe. Somehow it all seemed perfectly appropriate."

Du Toit, said the Daily Mail, had given a "genuinely unified resonance" to the Games.

She had set world records in winning two disability swimming gold medals, and had become the world's first disabled athlete to qualify for a final in an able-bodied event, the 800 metres freestyle.

The crowds loved her.

She remembers feeling very proud, and very wet.

"It certainly did rain," she said.

Later, Du Toit wrapped the trophy in a quilt and took it home to South Africa, unaware that she should have taken a replica instead because the original was made of platinum, gold and silver.

"I just put it in with the laundry and walked straight through customs with it," she said.

"They had to send two people to South Africa to take it back."

Du Toit met Thorpe a few times in Manchester.

"We both seemed to spend a lot of time in dope-testing," she said.

"We would sit and chat, and we shared a lift back to the Village."

It was a chance to share their memories of the 1998 Games in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where Thorpe made his mark with four gold medals as a 15-year-old.

Du Toit won none in her three events, but she was only 14.

At 17, Du Toit lost her left leg in an accident.

A woman drove out of a parking space "straight into my leg, not actually into my motorbike, and my leg split, like if you drop a tomato on the ground".

She was in intensive care and "five days later they decided to amputate". 

"So, I have an amputation through the knee and a titanium rod and three screws down my femur, and an artificial limb," she said.

Never one to look back on life's 'what ifs', Du Toit just wanted to get back in the pool.

Within a few months she was making great progress, and the following year she was winning medals in Manchester, much to the delight of the crowd.

"I'll never forget the support they gave me, all standing and clapping," she said. "The people in Britain always seem to get behind you."

There were more medals to come in Melbourne and Delhi, and many more at the Paralympics.

Du Toit swam in the Olympics and Paralympics in 2008, and carried the flag for South Africa at both those Games.

She ended her career in the pool at London 2012, and was soon in demand as a motivational speaker.

"The Commonwealth Games has been really special to me," she said.

Bobby Robinson, the founding father of the Games, was inspired in his efforts by the behaviour of the United States team at the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam.

"Arrogant and obnoxious" was the Canadian's view.

Robinson, the athletics team manager in Amsterdam, had first talked of creating the new "Empire Games", as they were known when they started in 1930, at the Paris Olympic Games in 1924.

He took his efforts to another level four years later. 

Among Robinson's gripes in Amsterdam, where Canada made an official complaint, were the absence of a Canadian flag when Percy Williams received his 100m gold medal; the fact that Americans were allowed to train on the track but Canadians were not; a disputed judges' decision in the women's 100m that went in favour of an American when the Canadians thought their runner had won; and a direct insult by Avery Brundage, then the most influential American in the Olympic Movement, to a Canadian team official.

The Toronto Star reported that meetings to discuss the Empire Games were held in Amsterdam "as a direct result of the dominance, real or attempted, by Germany and the United States at the Olympic meet... Robinson finally boiled over and, after consultation with other Canadian officials, met representatives of the other British teams and laid the foundation for what is hoped will be a series of British Empire meets to be held every four years".

Organisers of the inaugural Empire Games in Hamilton, Ontario - where Robinson worked - made clear their aims.

"The event will be designed on an Olympic model, but these Games will be very different," it was said.

"They should be merrier and less stern, and will substitute the stimulus of a novel adventure for the pressure of international rivalry."

Making it happen was a challenge that would have been beyond most people, but not the tireless Robinson.

Melville Marks "Bobby" Robinson left school in Peterborough, Ontario, at 13 and started at the Toronto News as an office boy, working his way up to become sports editor of the Hamilton Spectator in 1908, when he was 20.

He served in the First World War in a machine gun unit, and he also served his local community with distinction.

Robinson was on Hamilton's Education Board - he has a school named after him - and was secretary-treasurer of the Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers' Association.

He campaigned for farmers at a time of global economic downturn and was well known and respected throughout Ontario.

Robinson, who was also a lover of athletics, founded a prestigious club before being appointed Canada's Olympic team manager.

His influence helped him to persuade the leaders and businessmen in Hamilton, which was Canada's fifth largest city with a population of 151,000, to support the Empire Games despite the global financial crash.

To help persuade other nations to travel to Hamilton he enlisted the help of Canada's most influential railway man, a former Finance Minister, two bank Presidents and the heads of two local universities.

He dreamed up the idea of an Athletes' Village, of a medal ceremony on the podium, and of using volunteers to help the event run smoothly - all purloined by the Olympic Movement, whose leading figures were guests of honour in Hamilton.

As so many people wanted to watch the live action, he had to arrange for 1,000 extra seats to be installed at the Civic Stadium.

Before the week was out an Empire Games Federation had been formed, and the future of what would become the Commonwealth Games was assured.

Bobby Robinson died in 1974, aged 86, but his legacy lives on.

Harold Abrahams, the British sprinter who won Olympic gold in 1924 before becoming one of the most influential voices in athletics in the first half of the 20th century, wrote: "But for the unbounded enthusiasm and persistency of Mr Robinson, the whole thing would never have started."

"Rejoice with me, oh ye sports lovers of Nigeria," wrote a special correspondent after Ifeajuna had won the high jump.

"Who among our people did not weep for sheer joy when Nigeria came uppermost, beating all whites and blacks together?"

Ifeajuna was the first black African to win an individual gold medal in any sport at any major multi-sport Games.

No wonder he was given a hero's welcome when he returned home, and his picture adorned the cover of school exercise books throughout the land.

Ifeajuna would remain Nigeria's only gold medallist, in Commonwealth or Olympic sport, until 1966.

The next year, on September 25, 1967, he would be dead, shot by firing squad as a crowd of thousands watched.

He was no hero then, to those who hissed as he was tied to a stake.

But some historians have since taken a different view as they look back on the remarkable life, and death, of Emmanuel Ifeajuna.

Nigerians excelled in the high jump in the 1950s, when three of them finished in the top 20 at the Helsinki 1952 Olympic Games.

Ifeajuna was not a contender for the 1954 team for Vancouver until, as a 20-year-old outsider, he surprised everybody at the national championships with a jump of 6ft 5.5in and earned his place on the boat.

The high jump was on the first day and Ifeajuna wore only one shoe, on his left foot.

A correspondent wrote: "In his take-off stride his leading leg was flexed to an angle quite beyond anything ever seen but he retrieved position with a fantastic spring and soared upwards as if plucked by some external agency."

Ifeajuna cleared 6ft 8in to set a Games and British Empire record. That leap - just over 2.03 metres - would have been good enough for a silver medal in Helsinki two years earlier.

Soon after his return home, Ifeajuna's sporting career was finished - he was off to study at Ibadan University, he married a year later and then joined the army.

Why did the record-breaking champion stop competing?

"From October, 1954, when he enrolled at Ibadan, he never trained," said his old friend Chief Emeka Anyaoku, nearly 60 years later.

"He never had a coach - only his games master at grammar school - and there were no facilities at the university. He simply stopped.

"He seemed content with celebrating his gold medal.

"He was so gifted, he just did it all himself. Jumping barefoot, or with one shoe, was not unusual where we came from."

Anyaoku joined the Commonwealth Secretariat in 1966, the year when Ifeajuna and others led an attempted coup in Nigeria.

The coup attempt failed but Ifeajuna esacaped and would later return to fight in the Nigerian Civil War on the side of the secessionist state of Biafra.

Anyaoku rose to the highest office in the Commonwealth, secretary general, in 1990.

"I was devastated when I heard the news of the execution," he said.

Ifeajuna was all but written out of Nigeria's sporting history, but Anyaoku said: "The history of the civil war still evokes a two-sided argument.

"He is a hero to many people, though they would more readily talk about his gold medal than his involvement in the war.

"There are people who think he was unjustifiably executed and others who believe the opposite."

According to an official but disputed police report, Ifeajuna pulled the trigger when Nigeria's first Prime Minister, Tafawa Balewa, was shot and killed during the coup attempt.

Ifeajuna escaped to Ghana, dressed as a woman.

Twenty months later he was back, fighting for the persecuted Igbo people of eastern Nigeria in the civil war that broke out as a consequence of the coup attempt.

Ifeajuna and three fellow officers were accused by their own leader, General Emeka Ojukwu, of plotting against him and the breakaway Republic of Biafra.

They denied charges of treason and said they were trying to save lives and their country by negotiating an early ceasefire with the Federal Government and reuniting Nigeria.

They failed, and they were all executed.

Those are Cathy Freeman's words, spoken as she looked back on a remarkable career in athletics that included, in the view of an Australian television station, a starring role in the greatest moment in her country's Commonwealth Games history.

Running did not just make Freeman happy - it made her globally famous - and in a way that went beyond the boundaries of the sporting world.

That famous Commonwealth Games moment played an important part in Australia's social history.

It happened in Victoria, British Columbia, at the 1994 Games, where Freeman won two gold medals on the track, and won the hearts of millions back home in Australia and all around the world.

When she left for Canada the then 20-year-old made sure she had a flag that had been flown for the first time only 23 years earlier - the Australian Aboriginal Flag.

By then she had become a role model for the Aboriginal population.

Her people had lived in Australia for 50,000 years but the official national flag was designed with little more than a century of colonial rule in mind.

That was why, way back in 1938 when Sydney became Australia's first host city of the then Games, the aboriginal people declared a "day of mourning" rather than join in the celebrations of the "150th birthday" of Australia.

Those celebrations, based on the settlement of the country by Europeans, gave the Aborigines "no reason to rejoice" said their leader Jack Patten.

The Games and all the celebrations around them were yet another example of the Europeans overlooking the indigenous people of Australia and their struggles, he said.

Freeman was born in Mackay, Queensland, three hours from her extended family who lived at Woorabinda, an Aboriginal mission.

Her athletic talent took her away from Mackay but her heart remained there.

Freeman won her first Commonwealth Games gold medal when she was 16, in the sprint relay at Auckland in 1990. In doing so she became the first female Aboriginal gold medallist in the Games’ then-60-year history.

When she won the 400 metres in Victoria she went on a lap of honour with two flags intertwined and the world took notice.

Arthur Tunstall, who was more "Empire" than "Commonwealth" and who was 16 at the time of the 1938 Games, was outraged by Freeman's actions.

In his role as Australia's Chef de Mission he ordered the athletics team officials to inform Freeman not to display the Aboriginal flag after future events, or she would be sent home.

Freeman won the 200m too - and again paraded both flags.

Tunstall reprimanded Freeman and there was a huge public debate back home.

It was Tunstall who took a pasting, not Freeman.

Even Paul Keating, the Australian Prime Minister, said: "The Games revealed that the overall sentiment of Australians is for the reconciliation of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians."

Freeman mostly kept a dignified silence, but she did say it was the highlight of her athletic career at that point in her life and she wanted to encourage young Aboriginals "to achieve something".

Her pride in both her flags made such an impression that at the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games Australia's Aboriginal culture was a key theme.

And who was chosen to light the flame at the Opening Ceremony? Cathy Freeman – who then raced to a famous victory in the 400m.

After her retirement from athletics in 2003 - the year after she won another sprint relay gold at the Manchester 2002 Commonwealth Games - she founded the Cathy Freeman Foundation.

It works with remote communities to close the gap in education between indigenous and non-indigenous Australian children.

Whether any of it would have happened if Stephen had not won Commonwealth Games gold on the weightlifting platform in Auckland in 1990 is impossible to say.

But winning his country's first gold medal in any sport certainly helped - and it led to a public holiday being declared back in Nauru, the tiny Pacific island whose population was 10,000 at the time and is not many more now.

Nauru was known only for one thing in the decades after it gained independence in 1968 and that was guano, the phosphate deposits from bird droppings that had accumulated over millions of years.

For many years after Stephen's victory in the 60 kilograms class snatch - the first of seven Commonwealth Games golds between 1990 and 1998 - it was also known for producing weightlifters, and weightlifting remains Nauru's most popular sport to this day.

Stephen won seven Commonwealth Games golds and five silvers between 1990 and 2002, plus a silver at the World Championships in 1999.

He started a boom in popularity for a sport that had not existed in Nauru before.

"It was incredible," said his coach Paul Coffa, who quit as Australian national coach and moved to Nauru in the 1990s to set up the famous Oceania Weightlifting Institute.

"You just could not believe that while you drove around the island you would see young kids on the sidewalk, in their front gardens, with broomsticks practicing the snatch, and the clean and jerk."

In 1998, the year when Juan Antonio Samaranch, then President of the International Olympic Committee, flew to the island, Nauru had more lifters registered in international competition than China and Russia.

Before Stephen took up the sport, when he was studying in Melbourne, there was no such thing as weightlifting in Nauru.

When Coffa first met and worked with Stephen, who was a teenager at the time, he assumed he was Australian.

Stephen, like many teenagers from Nauru, had been sent to Geelong, near Melbourne, for his education.

He was among the school's best at cricket, rugby and Aussie Rules, but Coffa made sure he focused just on weightlifting.

Nauru had no membership of the Commonwealth Games Federation until three days before the 1990 Games in Auckland, when Stephen was cleared to lift.

He was ranked fourth or fifth and did not expect to win a medal.

"When I won a gold and two silvers it was a real shock," he said.

"Even so, I was still disappointed.

"I'd have won all three golds if I'd made my last lift in the clean and jerk.

"I told myself I'd definitely win all three in four years'time."

He did.

Stephen went into politics when he retired from weightlifting after the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester, where he won three silvers.

He worked for Nauru's national bank before becoming an MP in 2003 and, four years later, President for a four-year term.

Stephen met President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, on one of his official visits to the US.

He spoke at the United Nations and international forums, negotiated foreign policy and aid and wrote on climate change for the New York Times.

"Sport gave me confidence to take on the big challenges," he said.

Weightlifting is still his great love.

He is President of the Oceania Weightlifting Federation and sits on the Board of the International Weightlifting Federation.