The Games arrive in Asia

For the first time in its 68-year history, the Commonwealth Games were held in Asia. The XVI Games were held at Kuala Lumpur in the Malaysian state of Selangor.

The main stadium for the Games was the newly built National Stadium Bukit Jalil. The huge stadium possessed a 100,000 spectator capacity.

The Kuala Lumpur 1998 Games proved to be the first Games that featured team sports. The newly introduced sports were cricket, field hockey, netball and Rugby Sevens.

They joined athletics, badminton, boxing, cycling, gymnastics, lawn bowls, shooting, squash, swimming, ten-pin bowling and weightlifting to make a total of 15 different categories of events.

These proved to be an overwhelming success that added large numbers to both participators and TV audience numbers.

Rugby Sevens in particularly were an enormous success with New Zealand collecting its 100th Commonwealth Games medal with a 21-12 win over Fiji. Man of the match was the giant New Zealand rugby union superstar Jonah Lomu who had worked tirelessly during the 10-minutes each way final.

The logo for these games was inspired from the national flower of Malaysia, the Hibiscus. It was the first time that the colour yellow was introduced in the logo as all previous logos had been red, white and blue to reflect the colours of the British Union Flag.

The Kuala Lumpur 1998 Commonwealth Games proved to be a huge success and the home nation were delighted with their best finish of fourth having won 10 gold medals. Malaysia finished behind Australia, England and Canada.

Date Games held: September 30-October 9

Number of nations represented: 70

Number of competitors: 3,638

Number of medals awarded: 675