Funlessness and Games

For once, footage of a boredlooking Camilla made her look like a woman of the people.

It’s hardly as though everyone else at the Commonwealth Games closing ceremony was exulting in the experience.

Worse than that, many of those glazed-over spectators were the very athletes who should, by rights, have been at the beating heart of the ceremony.

They didn’t get to parade and lark about in front of the live cameras, winners and losers together, unified by the release of so much of tension and pressure.

Instead of that fun, looseness and sense of unburdened pleasure, the event seemed more a showcase for Australian Idol performers most of whom will have found their involvement less careerenhancing than they might have hoped.

And the speeches ... sheesh. Talk about endurance.

Even the marathon runners would have been wilting while the voices of the Commonwealth puffed halitosis-infused phrases of congratulation and aspiration around the stadium, as if the takehome message was that words, somehow, mattered more than deeds after all.

Reduced to hold-still-and-payattention spectators, athletes whose lives for so long have been all about stamina and discipline found that their stores of both were exhausted.

Long before the conclusion of the show, great numbers of them had cleared off, realising as they did that there must surely be better parties going on elsewhere.

Clearly the same thought had occurred to many thousands of the spectators.

That is a shame not only for them, but also for the volunteer participants. Especially the kids for whom this could, and should, have been a more inspirational occasion. It was hardly their fault.

Lessons will be learned for future Games as this ceremony serves its one truly useful purpose - a compelling cautionary tale about how not to do it. asdf Still, the Games themselves will still be well remembered, certainly from a New Zealand perspective.

The Kiwi successes surely outweighed the disappointments at team and individual levels, with many heart-in-the-mouth moments. Some of them led to eruptive celebrations throughout the country - surely none moreso than the women’s rugby heaping drama upon drama.

The miseries of the Silver Ferns’ performances were unalloyed but their pride should not have been put into question. The profundity of their distress showed as much.

On a daily basis, the New Zealand athletes showed in competition, and outside it, the human qualities that sport exists to evoke and reward. And if, longer term, the Aussies rediscover how to throw a halfway decent party, then so much the better.