Out of time? Unloved Commonwealth Games faces uphill battle to survive
The last time the Commonwealth Games was struggling to find a replacement host, after Durban was stripped of the event in 2017, it had help from an unlikely source: Buckingham Palace. An insider picks up the story. “The Palace went to the government and said: ‘It’s the Queen’s jubilee in 2022, you need to do something,’” he tells the Guardian. “UK Sport also then got a call. There was genuine pressure and that made Birmingham happen.”
On Monday the Commonwealth Games lurched towards yet another existential crisis after the Gold Coast withdrew its bid for 2026 – only four months after Victoria also pulled out.
This time, though, there will be no call from the palace and the UK government riding to the rescue with £594m
in its pocket. Just 16 months after the success of Birmingham 2022, organisers are again facing pointed questions about the event’s future.
Some of the challenges it faces are longstanding and vertiginous. Even the world’s best PR agency, you suspect, would struggle to rebrand an event which began in 1930 as the Empire Games for Britain’s colonies. And hosting a sporting event with more than 5,000 athletes is getting increasingly expensive. Birmingham 2022 cost an estimated £778m. Victoria 2026 was forecast to be four times that when organisers pulled the plug.
It doesn’t help when TV revenues are a fraction of the Olympics and Fifa World Cups, and when the threat of terrorism lingers. Security costs for the 2000 Olympics in Sydney totalled $250m (£198m). By Athens, four years later and after 9/11, they topped $1.6bn (£1.25bn).
To make matters tougher for organisers, economists have frequently found the supposed benefits of hosting mega-sporting events are overstated. Before hosting the 2002 Winter Olympics, for instance, Utah’s state government predicted it would generate 35,000 job-years. However, after crunching employment data from 1990 and 2009 in Utah, the economists Robert Baade and Victor A Matheson found “no identifiable increase in employment either before or after the Olympics”.
Their conclusion is worth noting. “Considering that the federal government spent $342m directly on the 2002 Olympics and at least another $1.1bn on infrastructure improvements leading up to the Games, this amounts to about $300,000 in federal government spending per job created,” they state.
“Indeed, these results lend credence to a common rule-of-thumb often used by economists who study mega-events: if one wishes to know the true economic impact of an event, take whatever numbers the promoters are touting and move the decimal point one place to the left.”
Any future Commonwealth Games will surely have to be smaller and cheaper to survive. Assuming, of course, there is a future. Insiders insist preliminary talks have been held with four regions about hosting in 2026 and they will give an update in the new year. But crucially India, the biggest fish in the Commonwealth outside of the UK and Australia, does not appear inclined to take the bait.
There are two major reasons for this. First, there is still a lot of lingering resentment between India and the Commonwealth Games Federation after the Games in Delhi in 2010 were mired in allegations of corruption and financial mismanagement. A parliamentary report in India on those Games also found “complete management failure” within the organisation and said the Indian government “nearly defaulted” on staging the event.
More recently, India threatened to pull out of the 2022 Games over the absence of a shooting event. To most observers, Narenda Modi’s government is now more focused on a far bigger target – hosting the Olympic Games in 2036.
In fairness to the CGF it deserves credit for frequently trying to innovate the Games, including by introducing eSports in Birmingham. It can also point to the way the event attracts a wider variety of athletes from superstars to enthusiastic amateurs.
Yet it will be a challenge to find a host for 2026 in such a short time. And given most international sports federations have already booked in events for that year, attracting big names might be harder than usual. In Birmingham many stars – include the Olympic and world champions Andre de Grasse, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce and Shericka Jackson – stayed away.
No wonder some close to the Commonwealth Games fear the worst. “I always thought the Games would continue until the centenary in 2030 and then stop,” says the insider who fondly remembers the day Buckingham Palace came calling. “But my genuine view is we have seen the last Games under this format. At best it will look dramatically smaller in size, scale and interest.”
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of the territory.”
Kirby’s embrace of an opposing interpretation comes amid reports of dissension within the White House among Biden’s own staff members, many of whom are torn over the president’s unambiguous support for Israel in the immediate aftermath of 7 October.
His comments also echo Biden’s own rhetoric, which has invoked the historical Jewish experience of murderous antisemitism and emphasised Hamas’s assault as the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Biden has since tried to qualify his earlier public statements, meeting with Arab American and Muslim leaders and expressing regret over comments casting doubt on the Palestinian death toll.
James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute and a veteran pollster, cast Kirby as part of a “group think” cabal surrounding Biden and impeding his political need to “inch back” from his initial post-7 October posture.
“There’s been a spontaneous support for Palestine on this issue [among normally pro-Democrat voters] that’s quite unprecedented and I know there are people in the party worried about losing this level of support,” said Zogby. “I know the president is trying to inch back, but there are people around him who just don’t get it.
“I think Kirby is a liability, period. We had a meeting with the secretary of state [Antony Blinken] a while back and Kirby was there. But the next day at his press briefing he made comments that were just not on board with the conversation that was being had. It’s almost as if he has an agenda that goes beyond the agenda that’s developing.”
This is not the first time Kirby’s pronouncements have put him in the political line of fire.
In 2014, while he was the official spokesperson for the Pentagon under the then defence secretary Chuck Hagel, he was branded “an idiot” by the late Republican senator John McCain of Arizona over his attempts to deflect criticism of the US effort to defeat the Islamic State.
After being reappointed to the same role after Biden’s 2020’s election win, he was plucked to work in the White House in May last year, frequently appearing beside the administration’s official press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, and emerging as a key proponent of US backing for Ukraine.
Kirby’s level of behind-the-scenes influence in the corridors of power is unclear, despite the suspicion of at least one observer that he has his “own agenda”.
In announcing Kirby’s White House appointment last year, Biden praised his “background, knowledge and experience” and highlighted his past role as a state department spokesperson, in addition to his ex-Pentagon post, as qualifying him to deal with the “complexities” of US foreign and defence policy.
In recent days, however, it appears that the need to change the direction of a conflict whose human costs are spiralling has been internalized by the administration, with Kirby evidently on board.
In a telephone conversation with Netanyahu last weekend, Biden voiced opposition to Israel switching its onslaught following the end of the recent ceasefires to southern Gaza, where an estimated 2 million people are believed to have gathered – at Israel’s demand. The president argued that Israel cannot repeat the sweeping operation it conducted in the northern part of the territory because the crowded conditions in the south creates the potential for deeper humanitarian suffering.
In a White House briefing on Tuesday, Kirby told reporters that the administration “does not support southern operations unless or until the Israelis can show that they have accounted for all the internally displaced people of Gaza”.
The White House has also made it clear to Israel that it expects increased aid levels for Gaza permitted during the pauses to be sustained even after hostilities resume – a policy that would presumably at least mitigate the darker consequences of the path mapped out by Eiland, the former Israeli national security council supremo who cited the benefits of “severe epidemics”.
Yet for many of the president’s detractors, this brings little comfort – with Kirby’s proxy role emblematic of what critics see as a sign of hypocrisy: the stark contrast between American condemnation of the killing of civilians in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and an apparent indifference to the number of Palestinians killed at the hands of Israel’s military onslaught.
“For me, Kirby is the mouthpiece of the American war machine and for those who have very selective outrage about the kind of civilians lives we mourn more than others,” said Usamah Andrabi, the communications director of Justice Democrats, a progressive group whose eight congressional members have vocally supported Palestinian rights.
“Most of us don’t understand why John Kirby, Joe Biden and Jake Sullivan [the national security adviser] don’t take Israeli leaders at their word when they say they want to wipe Gaza off the face of the planet.
“If Vladimir Putin said these things, I’m sure they would believe it.”