Skip to main content

Advertisement

Advertisement

Commonwealth Games: Sport’s strangest smorgasbord

GLASGOW — Scotland’s second city, Glasgow, once heralded more grandly as the “Second City of the Empire”, has broken out in a fever. Not the gastroenteritis that plagued Delhi 2010. This is a nice case of Commonwealth Games fever.

Hampden Park will be the venue for the track and field events at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. Photo: Getty Images

Hampden Park will be the venue for the track and field events at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. Photo: Getty Images

GLASGOW — Scotland’s second city, Glasgow, once heralded more grandly as the “Second City of the Empire”, has broken out in a fever. Not the gastroenteritis that plagued Delhi 2010. This is a nice case of Commonwealth Games fever.

After the debacle of the 1986 Games in Edinburgh, crippled by boycotts and day and night rain, Glasgow will present a prettier face to the world ahead of Scotland’s defining political crossroads: A referendum on independence from the United Kingdom.

The charged political atmosphere is indicative of the generalised insanity that sport engenders here.

Security, for a start, is intense: The Crowne Plaza hotel has become a fortress with no vehicles allowed within 500m, while the protocols for Sir Bradley Wiggins’ press conference are crazy: Where else would you find army snipers trained upon the roof of a lawn bowls club?

Even the Queen wants to attend the opening ceremony, whereas the London Olympics required the gimmick of her parachute jump with Daniel Craig. To her, the significance of the Games is a fundamental extension of her conviction that the Commonwealth still matters.

True, it brings no trade privileges and possesses no executive authority, but historically, the Commonwealth has served as an arbiter for good, not least in campaigning for tougher sanctions against apartheid, or in pressing Robert Mugabe to institute reforms in Zimbabwe.

Whether it is a workable template for intense sporting competition is even more of a moot point. It seems a bit disproportionate, for example, that the Isle of Man has sent eight artistic gymnasts?

But for all Nauruan weightlifters or clay pigeon shooters from the Falkland Islands, it pays to remember that the notion of arbitrary exclusivity in sport is hardly a novel one. Every four years there is a temptation to put down the Commonwealths as a daft historical construct, even though they shift in 2018 to Australia, which cherishes them dearly, before a likely 2022 date in Durban. Their future already looks healthy, even before a Glasgow Games almost guaranteed of success.

The simple fact is that the Commonwealth Games still present an invigorating antidote to the grating commercialism of mainstream sport, an opportunity for athletes from the marginalised provinces of squash and bowls to have their day.

Politically, the Commonwealth is so resilient that nations including Madagascar and Algeria, never part of the British Empire, are on the waiting list for inclusion.

“We are not the world,” explains secretary-general Kamalesh Sharma. “But we are a microcosm of it.”

So, now is not the time to scoff or to scorn. Instead, it is a chance to be intoxicated over these next 11 days by everything from Singapore’s paddlers to British Virgin Islands breaststrokers, to savour sport’s strangest smorgasbord. THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

Read more of the latest in

Advertisement

Advertisement

Stay in the know. Anytime. Anywhere.

Subscribe to get daily news updates, insights and must reads delivered straight to your inbox.

By clicking subscribe, I agree for my personal data to be used to send me TODAY newsletters, promotional offers and for research and analysis.