Heroes rise, games at a crossroads
NIt is no slight to any competitors, from our country or others, to say that the Commonwealth Games are not what they were
ew Zealand, we have a new sporting hero. Twenty-one-year-old athlete Imogen Ayris pole-vaulted through the pain to win a bronze medal in Birmingham, learning only after the fact that she had a fractured bone in her foot.
Just to add some poignancy to the pain, Ayris dedicated the medal to her late father, having promised she would make him proud. A large contingent of her family was there to witness the great moment.
There are many other impressive and admirable personal stories from a strong New Zealand showing at the 2022 Commonwealth Games, including Hamish Kerr’s historic win. Kerr scored the first-ever Commonwealth gold medal by a Kiwi male highjumper. Squash player Paul Coll and mountain bikers Sam Gaze and Ben Oliver added to a glorious day that Stuff sports writer Tony Smith saw as approaching the legendary heights of Peter Snell and Murray Halberg’s ‘‘golden hour’’ at the Rome Olympics in 1960.
In the pool, Lewis Clareburt swam past the pain when he put his Covid sickbed and food poisoning behind him to nab three medals, including two golds.
These are the individual stories that inspire us at events such as this. It has been a very good games for New Zealand. Our national total of 16 gold medals, as of yesterday, is threatening our all-time record of 17 golds, won in Auckland in 1990.
It has been a morale boost and a distraction in other ways. Post-heatwave Britain is looking glorious in summer, especially when viewed from a wet, bleak New Zealand winter. The triumphs in Birmingham are also a pleasant contrast to an equally bleak bout of national hand-wringing over the coaching of the All Blacks.
There is also a sunny glow of nostalgia. Depending on your age, the Commonwealth Games evoke Auckland in 1990, Christchurch in 1974 or the far-off days when the event was still known as the British Empire Games, and was held together not by a sense of a shared but fading past, but a more dynamic present.
It is no slight to any competitors, from our country or others, to say that the Commonwealth Games are not what they were, just as the Commonwealth itself has a growing sense of identity confusion.
The Commonwealth Games Federation has already made it clear that the 2022 games will be the last of its kind. Change seems necessary. Five of the past six games have been held in the UK or Australia, with Delhi in 2010 the sole outlier. This year’s event was originally planned for Durban, South Africa, but Durban lost its hosting rights due to missed deadlines and financial problems. That was an obvious indication of the economically unsustainable burdens that come with building major sporting infrastructure.
The games in Victoria, Australia, in 2026 will be decentralised and the federation has decreed that only swimming and athletics will be compulsory events. The hope is that the event can be fluid and adaptable to local strengths and more easily staged outside a handful of First World economies. Existing facilities are preferred, and athletes’ villages can become affordable housing.
But are they racing against time? While countries that ditch the monarchy and become republics can and do stay in the Commonwealth, and still compete in the games, a nagging sense remains of an event that depends on an older view of when much of the world map was still coloured pink.
The last-minute replacement of the Queen by Prince Charles, as royal representative at the games, only adds to the sense of an epoch approaching an end. When news broke during the games that the prince’s charitable fund gratefully received a £1 million donation from the family of Osama Bin Laden in 2013, the end seemed to be coming even closer.