Many of them would have been beaten by Bryant in more than one of the game's four formats - singles, pairs, triples and fours. And all of them were likely to associate a certain smell with their defeats.

That smell was Holland House, the tobacco brand favoured by Bryant, the most famous pipe-smoking sportsman of all time.

He did not always light his pipe, which he used to help him concentrate, but he got through about 50 grams of tobacco every day throughout the 1960s, 70s and 80s.

Bryant might well have gone down in Commonwealth Games history as the first athlete in any sport to win gold in four successive Games but for a quirk in 1966, when bowls was off the programme in Kingston, Jamaica.

He won in Perth in 1962, singles and fours, and also won the singles at Edinburgh 1970, Christchurch 1974 and Edmonton 1978.

Instead, the four-in-a-row achievement was made by one of his friends, the weightlifter Precious McKenzie, who won his first gold in Kingston and, like Bryant, was also a champion in the next three Games.

McKenzie met Bryant during his time in Bristol in the west of England, where the weightlifter worked in a shoe factory for a while.

Bryant, from nearby Clevedon, took up bowls aged seven and won his first national title two years before he became a Commonwealth Games winner for the first time.

One of his great rivals was the Scotsman Wille Wood, who looked back on the 1970s and 1980s and said: "Guys like David Bryant and me, we had the best of the bowls."

Because bowls was often shown live on the BBC, Bryant's fame was assured (partly because of the pipe) and he was awarded an MBE and a CBE, as well as a prestigious sports writers' award.

Bowls went through a sometimes difficult transition to professionalism, in which Bryant played a role as President of the Professional Bowls Association in the 1990s, helping to create the World Bowls Tour.

He was renowned for his never-give-up attitude, his sportsmanship and his sheer brilliance.

His playing partner Tony Allcock once said Bryant "had a uniqueness of inner strength above any individual" in bowls. "He could laugh with the opponent then immediately stand on the mat and deliver an absolute killer of a bowl," he said.

Bryant won six world titles and countless other big competitions, as well as his Commonwealth Games haul. He was also a prolific author on the sport, but he never made enough money to give up his day job as a teacher and, later, sports shop proprietor.

He died in 2020, aged 88. He had put away the pipe nearly 30 years before his death, as The Guardian recalled in quoting Bryant in its obituary of the most famous bowler of them all.

"I was quite a heavy smoker," he said.

"I suppose it became a ritual that gave me time to think. But when I retired from competitive bowls my wife, Ruth, said it was time I gave it up, and so I did."