BIRMINGHAM 2022: NO MORE ARCHERY
The chances of our sport reappearing in the Commonwealth Games look slim
In June 2021, the return of archery to the Commonwealth Games was quietly cancelled by the Indian sporting authorities, citing the uncertainty of Covid. The 2022 Commonwealth Archery and Shooting Championships, a medalawarding sidecar event scheduled to take place in Chandigarh, India, in January will no longer be held.
Archery is an optional sport in the Commonwealth Games and has appeared just twice on the programme in 21 editions – in Brisbane in 1982 and in Delhi in 2010 – though shooting has been included in all but one edition. (The 2010 compound competition was won by Bow’s own Duncan Busby.) In 2019, after archery and shooting failed to make it on to the sports programme for Birmingham 2022, a furious Indian Olympic Association started rattling sabres. The Birmingham organisers, in their infinite wisdom, had decided to give the precious optional spots to women’s cricket, beach volleyball and para table tennis.
India, livid, loudly proposed a boycott. If there was no shooting – one of India’s biggest ‘bankers’ in terms of medals – the biggest Commonwealth nation might not bother coming at all. In 2016, on the Gold Coast, India took 16 medals in shooting, including seven golds. They also took eight medals on the archery field in 2010. The threat caused major alarm within the UK Government, which was desperately hoping that the £788m event – the largest and most expensive sports event staged in the UK since London 2012 – would be a beaming advertisement for a global, post-brexit Britain.
A groundbreaking pragmatic solution was brokered. India would hold an archery and shooting championships earlier in 2022, and the medals awarded there would count towards the Commonwealth total. Of course, this option only made it on to the table in the first place because of the weight of India’s political clout: it would be a suggestion easily dismissed from a smaller Commonwealth nation. Julian Knight, local MP for Solihull, called the idea “an inelegant solution, but a solution all the same”, and rather starkly added: “The Games is about inclusivity and its second-rank nature compared to the Olympics means it has to compromise at times, that’s the simple truth.” Indeed, the history of large sporting events – very much including the Olympics – is littered with threats and political compromises.
However, the hierarchy of the Commonwealth Games in the multi-sport pantheon was made clearer recently, when in September 2021, India’s hockey teams pulled out of the competition. “With reference to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we have observed over the last 18 months that England has been the worst affected country in Europe,” Hockey India chief Gyanendro Ningombam wrote. “The Asian Games is
the continental qualification event for the 2024 Paris Olympic Games and keeping the priority of the Asian Games in mind, Hockey India cannot risk any members of the Indian teams contracting COVID-19 during the Commonwealth Games.”
Some saw this as a tit-for-tat measure after multiple international rows over quarantine issues, though it raises the spectre of the competition being increasingly diminished by Indian or other withdrawals.
It is not the only problem the Commonwealth Games Federation (CGF) is presently trying to navigate around. Multiple setbacks, accusations of overspending, and the still-unknown Covid landscape next year have contributed to a sense of unease about 2022. A planned athletes village near Birmingham was scrapped when half-completed during the pandemic and sold off early for housing. The Alexander Stadium, renovated for the athletics competition, has no major tenant lined up after the completion of the Games, and the track cycling will be controversially held in London, 136 miles away.
SHRINKING SPORTS
In June 2021, Louise Martin, the president of the CGF, suggested that the current Commonwealth Games model was “not sustainable”. Speaking to Inside the Games, Martin intimated that the Commonwealth Games need to be smaller, simpler and less costly to host, and that changes need to be made to help the event appeal to a younger audience.
“We can’t stay as we are – it’s not sustainable. We have to move on, we have to modernise... In my opinion, Birmingham will be the last one of this size. In the future, it will be more in keeping with what the country it’s going to wants,” she said.
A key part of this modernisation would be a review of the sports programme. This is the total number of different sports practised at a Games, and is distinct from the event programme (so a sport would be ‘archery’, while an event might be ‘men’s team recurve’). Birmingham 2022 will feature 4,500 athletes over 19 sports and 270 medal events. For comparison, Tokyo 2020 featured 11,656 athletes doing 33 sports and 339 events.
The choices on which sports to chop are down to the 71 Commonwealth federations around the world. However, any reduction in the programme seems ever more likely to exclude archery, though once again, it depends on what happens to shooting. If shooting is excluded for any reason from the next edition, the Indian Olympic Association or someone else may again offer to host a sidecar championships. “The Chandigarh 2022 concept has identified exciting opportunities regarding future co-hosting possibilities that we must further explore,” said the CGF recently, all but confirming a similar proposal would be accepted again.
India has also been named as a potential host for the Games in 2026, or possibly 2030. Malaysia, Sri Lanka, the city of Victoria in Canada and several Australian cities have all been named as possible 2026 hosts, though an announcement on the host city was due to be made more than a year ago.
OLYMPIC INFLUENCE
Archery has not always had such a safe place in the Olympic programme since its return to the Games in 1972, though its place in the Olympic programme currently looks assured, with World Archery secretary-general Tom Dielen telling Bow last year that he was “not concerned at all” about it.
Nevertheless, where the Olympics lead, other multi-sport competitions may follow. Weightlifting and boxing, two popular sports long beleaguered by endemic corruption as well as doping, are even facing the prospect of removal from the programme for Paris 2024. It is also expected that the Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028 will be a ‘game-changer’ for the sport programme. Many believe that modern pentathlon is for the chop, and shooting’s place in the programme is not necessarily assured either, though the sport’s wide inclusivity around the world may save it. If shooting leaves the Olympics, it will most likely leave other multi-sport events too.
Selling the Olympics – especially the winter version – to sceptical local administrations and the public in democracies is becoming ever more difficult. It is looking increasingly like the Commonwealth Games is an even harder sell; big and expensive and complicated but without enough cachet to get it past the increasingly large financial and bureaucratic hurdles inevitably thrown up in its path. And the long tail of Covid looks likely to cause many more problems for the Commonwealth movement long before the opening ceremony in Birmingham.
“THE GAMES CAN’T STAY AS THEY ARE – IT’S NOT SUSTAINABLE”