It is not just those outside the Commonwealth who wonder what the Commonwealth Games mean at this stage.
On Saturday, the Sydney Morning Herald ran an essay with the headline: “Why we should still love the Commonwealth Games.” If the sports-loving Australians, who have topped the medal table for the last six editions of the event, feel the need to convince themselves, imagine how the unaffiliated see — or, more accurately, do not — see it.
For most of the sporting planet, the Commonwealth Games, 11 days of competition that opened yesterday in Glasgow, Scotland, and end on Aug. 3, are a quadrennial irrelevance. They are a curious colonial vestige with some of the pomp and circumstance of the Olympics, minus most of the heavy hitters — except for, in this instance, track superstar Usain Bolt.
Photo: AFP
The three nations who won the most medals at the last Summer Olympics in 2012 in London — the US, China and Russia — do not participate in the Commonwealth version or pay millions, much less billions, to broadcast them. Other essential sports nations who are on the outside not looking in include Argentina, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea and Spain.
There is also Brazil and, come to think of it, if one is looking for an event that symbolizes the legacy of the British Empire, what better candidate than the FIFA World Cup that just ended in Brazil? Soccer has clearly been Britain’s most successful sporting export.
Nevertheless, the Commonwealth Games press on into the 21st century and ultimately, it is for the states and micro-states that continue to take part in this tournament to decide whether it remains worth the expense and trouble in a landscape where athletes have plenty of more geopolitically coherent forums in which to compete. That landscape already includes plenty of Olympic satellite material, from the Asian Games and Pan-American Games, to the first European Games set to take place next year in Baku.
The tournament does have more history than most. This will be the 20th edition. The first was staged in 1930 in Hamilton, Ontario, and was called the British Empire Games, a name that morphed with the times and the sensibilities to become the Commonwealth Games in 1978.
The competition in Glasgow comes at a watershed moment politically as the Scottish referendum on independence looms on Sept. 18, but then Scotland, like Wales and Northern Ireland, has long expressed its independence in sporting terms and will, as usual, have their own team at the Commonwealth Games. British Olympian Euan Burton will compete for Scotland in judo, while his wife, Gemma Gibbons, an Olympic silver medalist in 2012, will compete for England.
There will be 71 delegations in Glasgow competing in 17 sports. They represent six continents, although not much of a continent in some cases (Guyana is the only representative from South America). Still, it is quite a geographic and demographic footprint, encompassing India, with more than 1.2 billion inhabitants, and Saint Helena, a British overseas territory with a population of about 4,000.
However, Indians are presumably more interested in their cricket Test matches with England also being staged this summer. The main nations in sporting terms at the Commonwealth Games remain England and Australia, whose rivalry might not be as piquant as it used to be, but is still a rivalry.
Both will have much of their top talent in Glasgow. England expects to have star distance runner Mo Farah and cycling ace Bradley Wiggins. Farah is the reigning Olympic, world and European champion in the 5,000m and 10,000m, while Wiggins won the 2012 Tour de France and plans to compete in the road time trial and indoors on the track.
England also has an emerging figure in Katarina Johnson-Thompson, who is expected to follow the path of the Olympic champion Jessica Ennis-Hill and become a global threat in the heptathlon.
The Commonwealth Games is often a fine, less-floodlit springboard to higher altitudes for young athletes. Consider Cathy Freeman, the 2000 Olympic champion in the 400m who first ran for Australia aged 16 at the 1990 Commonwealth Games in Auckland, New Zealand.
Australia is sending hurdler Sally Pearson, cyclist Anna Meares and what should be a powerful swim team, led by James Magnussen, the reigning world champion in the 100m freestyle, although he lost the 100m to teammate Cameron McEvoy at the Australian Trials.
Magnussen and his Australia side belly-flopped at the London Olympics, failing to win a single individual gold in swimming and making other waves with revelations of sleeping pill abuse, hard partying and questionable management.
Australia’s swim team has since changed leadership, hiring a new president, former America’s Cup winner John Bertrand, and head coach, Dutchman Jacco Verhaeren, who made his name working with Olympic medalists Pieter van den Hoogenband and Inge de Bruijn.
Verhaeren and Australia will be under the microscope in Glasgow, even if the much more compelling swim meet this year should be the Pan Pacific Championships next month, when Missy Franklin, Katie Ledecky, Ryan Lochte, Michael Phelps and the US team will take on Australia in their home waters in Gold Coast, Queensland.
Even Bolt, the world’s fastest man on land, is only making a cameo in Glasgow. He plans to run for Jamaica only in the final of the 4x100m relay. The leading women’s sprinter of this era, Shelley-Ann Fraser-Pryce of Jamaica, has the same plan and will thus not get a rematch with young Trinidadian Michelle-Lee Ahye, who beat her last week in the Diamond League meet in Glasgow.
David Rudisha, the Kenyan who broke the 800m world record on one of the most memorable nights of the London Olympics, will run in the Commonwealth Games although none of the medalists from last year’s world championships in the 800m that he missed will be there to challenge him.
Yet there are sports in which the Commonwealth Games feel much less like an exhibition or tuneup and much more like a global peak. Most of them are non-Olympic events, though.
There is netball, the women’s sport that has long been dominated by Australia and New Zealand, but in which England are a threat. There is lawn bowls and squash, in which reigning women’s world champion Laura Massaro and men’s world champion Nick Matthew are English and the world’s top-ranked female player, Nicol David, is Malaysian.
Rugby sevens, a sport that is joining the Olympic program in 2016 in Rio, also has a strong field in Glasgow, as do men’s and women’s field hockey.
The games, often viewed as behind the curve in terms of identity, continue to be ahead of the curve with their inclusive and expansionary approach to parasport, with 22 events in five sports part of the full program in Glasgow.
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