[March 04, 2006]
Success story to outlive last vestiges of Empire
(Yorkshire Post Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)As Britain’s top sports stars head Down Under, Bill Bridge looks back at the history of the Commonwealth Games.
EMPIRE is an unfashionable concept these days, but when the Rev Astley Cooper was in his prime it was all the rage and the latest celebration of his idea to bring together the people who inhabited the pink parts of the globe opens in Melbourne this month.
The good reverend first made the suggestion in an article in Greater Britain magazine in 1891 - when Victoria was Empress of India and much more - that some sort of festival of the Empire would be a grand idea. He later wrote much the same thing for The Times and even though 40 years were to pass before his notion came to fruition it is the Rev Cooper who is remembered as the father of the Commonwealth Games.
He sought the establishment of a “Pan-Britannic-Pan-Anglican contest and festival every four years as a means of increasing the goodwill and good understanding of the British Empire”.
He enjoyed the support of Richard Coombs, who held the post of president of the Amateur Athletic union of Australia for 35 years and campaigned for a meeting of athletes from across the Empire for many years.
Progress was made in 1911 when, to mark the coronation of King George V, a “Festival of Empire” was staged in London and attracted teams from Australia, Canada, South Africa and the United Kingdom to compete in athletics, boxing, swimming and wrestling events.
The Great War rendered international sport too trivial for consideration, but after the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp and the Paris Games four years later, track-and-field teams from the Empire and the United States met in London, first at Queen’s Club then at Stamford Bridge. The reverend’s seed had started to germinate.
In 1928, the Olympics were staged in Amsterdam (imagine Europe hosting three successive Olympics these days) and it was in Holland that a Canadian, Melville Marks Robinson, universally known as Bobby, called a meeting of officials from the nations of the Empire attending the Games and suggested a gathering of their athletes every four years. As is often the way when anyone comes up with a good idea, he was asked to get on with it.
The first British Empire Games were held two years later in Hamilton. Since then the Games have run in various guises, their official title illustrating the phases of development from Empire to Commonwealth.
Empire remained the key word until 1954 when the Vancouver gathering was the first to be called the British Empire and Commonwealth Games. In Edinburgh in 1970 they became the British Commonwealth Games and in 1978 the Commonwealth Games. Canada and Australia have each hosted the Games on four occasions, New Zealand three, England and Scotland two and Wales, Jamaica and Malaysia one. The 2010 Commonwealth Games will be in Delhi and the candidate cities for 2014 are Ajuba (Nigeria), Glasgow, Halifax (Canada) and Windhoek (Namibia).
It would not be sport if there were not some political involvement and two Games were affected by boycotts.
Nigeria refused to take part in Edmonton in 1978 because of New Zealand’s sporting links with South Africa and Margaret Thatcher’s attitude to the apartheid issue brought the withdrawal of 32 nations from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean from the 1986 Games in Edinburgh.
The Games themselves are run to strict regulations. Each meeting must include a minimum of 10 and a maximum of 15 disciplines. These are drawn from a list of “core” sports supplemented by others from a list of “approved” sports at the discretion of the host nation. The core sports in Melbourne from March 15-26 are athletics, aquatics (swimming, diving and synchronised swimming), lawn bowls, netball (women) and seven-a-side rugby (men). Approved sports include regulars like badminton, boxing, cycling and gymnastics, but also others like billiards.
Since 2002 there have also been events for athletes with a disability in athletics, swimming, table-tennis and power-lifting.
Only six nations have attended every Games - Australia, Canada, England, New Zealand, Scotland and Wales - but this month up to 5,000 competitors from 71 countries are expected in Melbourne, making the 2006 Games the third largest such gathering in the world, behind the Olympics and the World Police and Fire Games.
The Rev Astley would have been proud that his idea should have become such a massive success - a concept which has survived far longer than the all-powerful Empire of his day.