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.