5 min readJul 25, 2026 09:44 PM IST
Nauru and Niue are self-governing Pacific nations of a few thousand people, and both have had a head of government compete at the Commonwealth Games. Nauru’s Marcus Stephen did it years before he ever held office. Niue’s Dalton Tagelagi did it while he was already Prime Minister. Neither is on the floor at Glasgow this week.
Marcus Stephen was Nauru’s lone athlete at the 1990 Auckland Games, a twenty-year-old ranked fourth or fifth in his weightlifting class, not expected to medal. Nauru had joined the Commonwealth Games Federation three days earlier. “When I won a gold and two silvers,” Stephen told Inside the Games, “it was a real shock.” Nauru declared a public holiday. The Nauru Weightlifting Federation had been founded the year before, mostly so he could compete internationally.
Two years later, wanting to lift at Barcelona, Stephen discovered Nauru wasn’t yet an IOC member. “Little did they know,” he told RNZ, “that you have to be a member first.” Nauru’s leaders arranged him a Samoan passport, and he competed under a flag that wasn’t his, finishing ninth. By Atlanta 1996, Nauru had its own membership, and Stephen carried its flag into the opening ceremony himself. He retired in 2002 having lifted at four Commonwealth Games, winning seven golds and five silvers, more than any Commonwealth weightlifter besides one.
In father’s footsteps
A year later he was in parliament, taking up the seat his father had held for two decades, mostly, he has said, because it was expected of him. He became president in December 2007, five years after retiring. His near four years were volatile: opposition Speaker David Adeang accused his administration of effectively staging a coup, a state of emergency followed, and two elections in one year ended deadlocked. He resigned in November 2011 amid a corruption allegation over a phosphate deal, which he called “unwarranted and mischievous” and which was never tested in court. A former Secretary of Justice would later suggest those chaotic years might be remembered as Nauru’s high point for good governance, compared with what came after. Even at their most volatile, the courts still held: when Nauru’s Supreme Court struck down a ruling by opposition Speaker David Adeang, the country abided by it.
Writing in the New York Times that same year, Stephen called Nauru, its interior scarred and uninhabitable after a century of phosphate mining, an “indispensible cautionary tale about life in a place with hard ecological limits.” He lost his parliamentary seat in 2016, returned in 2019, and is now, per Nauru’s own government bulletin, the longest-serving Speaker in the country’s history. He still runs the sport that made him: president of Nauru’s Olympic Committee and the Oceania Weightlifting Federation. Four Nauruan weightlifters are in Glasgow this week. He’ll watch from that vantage, not the platform.
Niue’s Dalton Tagelagi debuted in lawn bowls at Glasgow 2014, a private citizen then, and returned at Gold Coast 2018 as a junior minister, losing 21–7 in the singles. Across those two Games he won a single match, much as Stephen once had. He became Prime Minister in June 2020, elected by Niue’s Assembly 13 votes to 7. That is where the resemblance breaks.
Two years later he went to Birmingham as a competitor and a head of government at once, partnering his own 14-year-old son in the pairs. They lost every match, as did every other Niuean bowler. The Games were the least complicated part of that fortnight: Niue’s Lawn Bowls Association had taken the country’s sports federation to the Niue High Court, arguing the Birmingham team, Tagelagi’s team, had been selected without authority. The court agreed, ruling the selection null and void weeks before the team flew out; an injunction to ground the bowlers was narrowly avoided. Tagelagi split that fortnight between Birmingham and Wellington, meeting New Zealand’s Prime Minister even as the court case unfolded back home. A Niuean boxer won the country’s first-ever Commonwealth medal at those same Games while the Prime Minister’s team went winless.
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He isn’t in Glasgow this week either, the first Games in three he’s missed. Niue held a general election on 2 May, and the leadership vote was the tightest of his career, 11 to 9. He was sworn in for a third term ten weeks before these Games began, with barely a majority to govern.
Both men are watching Glasgow from outside the competition. Stephen’s absence is the settled kind: his sport and his politics were always two different chapters, and he has spent two decades since as a former athlete embedded in the sport’s administration, no longer needing to compete to belong to it. Tagelagi’s is the unsettled kind: a Prime Minister who was still bowling at the last Games, and isn’t at this one, ten weeks into the tightest mandate of his career.
