The biggest hero for the home crowds was, by some distance, Liz Lynch - later to become Liz McColgan - who was on the dole when she won the women's 10,000 metres race - Scotland's only gold medal in athletics.

The undisputed champion of headline-making at Edinburgh 1986 was none of those medallists, though. It was Robert Maxwell, a Jewish Czech war hero whose mother died in Auschwitz; a self-educated son of a peasant farmer who spoke 10 languages.

He made a fortune from publishing, allegedly helped along by Britain's secret service, and was an MP for six years. 

But he was "not a person to be relied upon" according to the Department of Trade, which investigated his dealings. He owned the world's largest scientific and educational publishing company, two football clubs, Mirror Group Newspapers and a massive ego.

These were the most bizarre, most troubled Commonwealth Games ever staged. A few weeks before the Opening Ceremony there had been talk of cancellation because of a boycott led by African countries. They were furious that Britain refused to impose hard-line economic sanctions against South Africa during the apartheid era.

With five weeks to go to the Opening Ceremony, Mirror Group became the main backers and Maxwell took over as chairman of the company running the Games.

Maxwell himself said he was "the saviour". He hinted as much to The Queen when he was introduced to her in Edinburgh by his personal photographer and aide Mike Maloney, who had been on many royal assignments. 

Maxwell presented The Queen with a gift of a set of coins in a magnificent display box and said: "Permit me to present you with a token of this great event that I have orchestrated."

People were still arguing about Maxwell's role nearly three years later when the last of the bills was finally paid, although not by him. A couple of years after that he was dead, his name blackened forever. 

In November 1991 Maxwell - whose daughter Ghislaine was found guilty in the United States for her role in the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking scandal - went overboard from his private yacht in the Mediterranean. He had fraudulently misspent hundreds of millions of pounds from his employees' pension funds.

Without his efforts in 1986, though, the Edinburgh Games would have been an embarrassment that Scotland, Britain and the Commonwealth Games Federation might never have lived down.

Maxwell liked to do things differently. On one occasion he invited a number of VIPs and their partners to dinner at his private suite. He served them Kentucky Fried Chicken straight from the bucket.

At another function he introduced his friend Ryoichi Sasakawa to the press. He announced the Japanese businessman, who pumped in millions, as a multi-millionaire philanthropist who had "single-handedly funded the eradication of leprosy". 

That claim was strange enough, given that more than 200,000 were still suffering from the disease a quarter-of-a-century later, but Sasakawa left reporters even more dumbfounded when he told them that he was 27-years-old and would live to the age of 200. He was 87 at the time.

Why did Maxwell get involved? Maloney believes that somebody made a speculative suggestion to him about backing the Games, and he suddenly saw a great opportunity. "He thought he could be the saviour, and he was," said Maloney, who was with Maxwell for his six-week involvement in Edinburgh.

The boycott led to 32 teams and nearly 1,500 athletes staying away.

One of Maxwell's first pronouncements after taking over was that the early preparations had been "appallingly amateurish". He made an immediate impact, putting newspaper owners and editors on media committees in London and Edinburgh to ensure favourable coverage.

He gained millions of pounds worth of positive publicity. Logos for the Mirror and its Scottish sister paper, the Record, were everywhere. Officially the Games' main sponsors were Guinness. In reality it appeared to be Mirror Group.

The accountants Coopers and Lybrand totted up all that exposure and put a value on it: £4.3 million. By the final reckoning Maxwell had not even paid £300,000, and the Games ended up £3.8 million in debt. Local councils ended up paying most of it, not Maxwell and his companies.

"He got worldwide publicity, which was his main aim," said Maloney. "Even so, he was the saviour of the Games, and he loved it."