佐竹雅昭
In the 1998 WGP qualifier last year's final 8 (Francisco Filiho, Sam Greco, 2 time WGP champion Peter Aerts, Mike Bernardo, former WGP champion Andy Hug, Masaaki Satake and defending WGP champion Ernesto Hoost) minus Jerome Le Banner who was injured, were set up against a brand new batch of would be K-1 fighters to see who would go on to the finals. All of last year's fighters made it past the qualifying round and were joined by New Zealian Ray Sefo who out muscled Stefan Leko in the qualifiers.