“Have-a-go heroes” of the Commonwealth Games

The Commonwealth Games are always a rather unusual tournament, said Rick Broadbent in The Times. They stand out for their “eclecticism”, with stars competing alongside “have-ago heroes”. A notable example of the latter is Bernard Chase, a 63-year-old dreadlocked grandfather from Barbados. He suffered a heart attack last year – but competed in the shooting nonetheless, despite having glaucoma. And one of the “darlings” of the tournament is Anna Hursey, an 11-year-old who has found “a novel way of spending the school holidays”: she played a key role in the Welsh table-tennis team that made it to the quarter-finals.

It’s in lawn bowls, above all, that underdogs have thrived, said Ben Bloom in The Daily Telegraph. The Cook Islands (population: 17,000) took bronze in the mens’ pairs bowling – the Pacific country’s first ever medal in a Commonwealth Games. And in the men’s lawn bowl triples, Norfolk Island – “a tiny stretch of land” in the Pacific Ocean, east of mainland Australia – also took bronze. With a population of just 1,700, the former penal colony has just one lawn bowls club; its team featured a 62-year-old taxi driver and a 55-year-old farmer, the eighth-generation descendant of Bounty mutineers. Few people had given the team “much chance” – especially not in their bronze medal match against Canada, a country of 36 million. Yet the enormous disparity in size “proved happily irrelevant”.