Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION The Anywhere Machine Commonwealth Games

So, does anyone care?
Does anyone outside of Australia and Britain and Canada even know what I'm talking about? Do the Brits and Canadians even know what I'm talking about?

All I know is that I live in the heart of all sorts of craziness thanks to the Games, and all I got for my taxpayer dollars was a bizarre opening ceremony that featured the adventures of a boy and his duck and scenes that I swear you could have slipped into Max Max: Beyond Thunderdome, and no-one would have noticed.

And to be honest, I don't even really care that as usual, Australia is kicking @$$ and taking names... As can be seen here: Commonwealth Games Medal Table

Aussie Aussie Aussie! Oi Oi Oi!!

(stands up and speaks into the mic) I'm an American, and I know what the Commonwealth Games are.

and now, I'm going to forget! Ha!

Go All Blacks!

Hey! That's the chant that Joseph Hachem's friend used to get him through the World Series of Poker championship last year.

We have a 12-step programme to help with that.

*Snort.* Rugby. Almost as bad as American 'Football'.'

He probably wanted the money to hire a hitman to get rid of whoever was making all that irritating noise as he was trying to think.
Australians... All louts.

Yeah.

My wife suffers from OCD - Olympics Compulsive Disorder - but it tends to tip over into the Commonwealth Games too. So it's constantly on the telly in my house.

It's been great these last few days watching the Scots win medals in the swimming and the velodrome - cos we know we've got f*** all chance of winning any in the athletics.

Well I'm in Manchester so we had all the Games craziness four years ago and I have to say it was fabulous. We were there for the opening and closing ceremonies and lots of the athletics so we have been watching the Melbourne games a fair amount as well. The opening was... odd. In a good way odd, but yeah I didn't quite get the whole thing with the duck. It's not often you see a performing duck, but there's always a first time for everything.

You know, it does bug me that Australia does so much better in temr sof the medals than all the UK counttries added together. We have a larger population, we are slightly richer as a country adn yet we simply don't put the money into sport the way the Aussies do. Maybe ustralia is simply a more athletic nation or soemthing, but that seems a bit unlikely. We must have the talent but we just don't seem nuture it. For example there's a gymnast who was used in loads of the advertising for teh 2012 Olympics who has just announced he's having to quit because he can't afford to train anymore because he can't get the financial backing. That's pretty bloody pathetic really.

That being said there have been some great medals. Scotland are doing unexpectedly brilliantly in the swimming (what is it now, six golds or something?), there was the English girl in the sychronised swimming who had just come to get experience for the next Olympics and got the silver and a couple of other things like that. I'm also really pleased to see that they're following the precedent set in Manchester by having the special Games running at the same time as the main Games. I don't think you could do it at the Olympics (just because of the size of the Games) but it does mean that the attendance for the special events are way up and it puts all the athletes on the same level. I think that's important really. Oddly enough the Uk does much better in the special Games than in the regular ones. Not sure how that relates to my previous rant but there we go...

Oh, and one of the most amusing things from the opening ceremony was finding out that the Kiwi basketball team are called the Tall Blacks. He he he. I have a very silly sense of humour.

I experimented with digital TV by plugging my coaxial cable into my computer and recording the broadcast, so I sat thru the whole thing. The Duck thing was a retelling of a poem that nobody seems to know by a morose and smugly-superior (well, to my mind anyway) artist called Leunig, who's seen doing cartoons in the Melbourne newspaper The Age.
I found it intensely amusing to see all those big strong football captains trepidously creeping across that floating pontoon walk along the Yarra. Which apparently you had to pay $400 to get a seat to.

Sigh. If you ask me, we put too much emphasis on sport.

It may sound trite, but I really think the weather has a lot to do with it. If it's cold and wet and grey, what else is there to wander down to the pub and nurse a few ales where it's warm. But if the sun is ripping through the sky and every second path seems to lead to a beach or sporting oval or golf course or basketball court or soccer pitch, it's hard not to get into some kind of sport. I think the weather has made it easier to engender more acceptance of sports culture-wide in Oz.
Sure - Australian Rules Football, the dominant winter sport (for guys) in southern Australia is typically played in cold rain, but I figure if you'll stupid enough to run around in the hot sun, you'll do it in a chilly shower as well.

The funniest Queen-related thing I've seen from her visit was where a comedian from an Aussie news satire show followed along trying to get her to sign an order of dismissal to get rid of Prime Minister John Howard. When they refused to acknowledge him, he called out in disgust, "Oh, could you at least dismiss Kim Beazley?" (The Oppostion Leader.)

Bevis - I saw part of one of the BBCs programmes which went into why the Aussies are doing so well.

Apparently at the 76 Olympics they came back home without a single gold medal. And were well pissed off.

So they looked around at who was doing what, and followed the lead of the East Germans, who assessed EVERY child from a very young age, and encouraged them all to carry on with the sports they were good at. Nurtured them. Set up an academy for these kids to carry on their area of expertise.


I think with us Brits its just a case of "Get on with it yourself. Sponsorship? We didn't have any of this crap 60 years ago - why should we need it now? And we were world beaters then ......"

Yeah, and we still had something we could call a Commonwealth then too!

So, maybe if we want something like this set up we have to be pathetic too?

Yeah, that was pretty funny. Even the BBC commentators were sniggering about that. I did think the very end of that with teh walking on water was pretty darn clever though. Plus I was impressed by Delta Goodrum and the fireworks going off round her. She must have been absolutely cacking herself doing that song.

You could well be right about the weather playing a part in why the Aussies are so much better at sport, but what Numf says also makes a lot of sense. I think we're awfully complacent in this country about nurturing talent (be it sporting, artistic or whatever). There is still that sense of 'we're the best because we always have been' without anyone actually aknowledging the fact that we're not the best by a long shot any more. It's the same with Welsj rugby in a way. It's taken as read by most Welsh people that we're great at rugby, it's our national sport and all that gubbins but at the same time we don't actually expect to win anything because we're not actually that good. Only no-one seems able to do anything about it.

Yay the Commonwealth Games are back. It's a good thing too because its the one week in four years that I can see Lawn Bowls on the TV. For those who dont know what bowls are, think about snooty old English guys with big sun hats, deck chairs, a pot of tea and cucumber sandwiches.

It looks like the "Canadian" trend of our fat men not being able to do anything while our women go out and win stuff is starting up already.

AHHH 1976 the year the mayor of Montreal promised to stage the Olympics for 130 million dollars before the budget ballooned to 1.5 billion. For that price we get a stadium that wasn't finished until 1986 and that's literally crumbling by 1996. Canada proudly became the first host nation not to win a single gold medal.

To celebrate the 25th anniversary they announced the debt from the games had been retired.

Aww, I liked the stadium in Montreal. Of course that being said the games there were a bit of a debacle, shall we say. To be fair though I don't think there's been an Olympics since where they haven't lost money in a big way. Manchester Commonwealth Games I think were one of the first ones to break even which makes us a bit smug about it. ourse here they built a stadium that was essentially sold for cost to Manchester City fottball club and the swimming pool was tiny (by international games standard anyway) and is now making money as the main pool in Manchester and virtually every other venue was already in place. As I understand it Melbourne has done Ok as well even if not all the tickets have been sold (they weren't here either though so it's obviously not the end of the world if that happens).

It is odd how some countries seem to be great at certain sports and suck at other ones. Like the way that when it comes to badminton and squash England seems to be *the* country to beat (three of the semi-finalists in the mens single squash were English) but that we suck at almost everything else. Oh, actually we're pretty good at cycling too. And shooting.

<<Aussie Aussie Aussie! Oi Oi Oi!!>>

just like the lil' brit punks in the chips ahoy commercial... i knew it;-D

OK, let's be fair here. The openeing ceremony at Manchester was better than the one at Melbourne. *But* the closing ceremony for Melbourne outshone Manchester by a mile. OK so it was absolutely pissing it down in Manchester for the closing ceremony but even with that it wasn't a patch on the Melbourne ceremony (we actually left before the end of the Manchester one).

1000 Ednas! The whole I *heart* M bit with Love Hearts! And the whole handover sequence for New Dehli. If that's anything to go by then 2010 is going to be pretty damn impressive.

On the Beeb the last week they've been talking a lot about whether the Commonwealth Games still has a relevance when clearly the Commonwealth, or at least the Empire, now doesn't mean as much. I do think in a way that's true. Politically and culturally the Commonwealth is incredibly diverse and a lot of the countries are completely independent of each other now. But, and I think this is the point, I think there's still that link there. We have a shared history (not all good, but then no history is all good) and there's a sense that the Games are... well, the whole 'Friendly Games' thing I son't think is a cliche. The athletes are there to win, to do the best and prove how good they are but they also seem to have much more of a good time than they do at the Olympics or the World Championships. Maybe that's just my perception of it, but it's the same thing that a lot of the athletes were saying this week as well.

Course, that being said something also really needs to be done with regards to England and the UK's track and field athletes (especially the men). The sprint guys and the 4x100m men's relay team were pitiful. MLF completely screwed it for them in the kind of mistake that should never happene, and the women made a stupid mistake with the lane violation (althoguh to be fair we weren't the only country that fell foul to that). Hopefully we'll have actually got our acts together before the next Olympics.

All in all though the Games have been fantastic. There's never going to be the same buzz that we got actually having the Games going on in the same city that you're living in but we watched a huge amount of it on telly and it seemed to zip by far too quickly.

Well, it's all over now... Melbourne is slowly coming back to normal amidst a flurry or back-slapping from the organisers. And really, it'll go like it was never here. It's not like we actually built any new facilties (Melbourne is sports mad) except for a mountain bike track north of the city so there aren't even any real reminders of the Games left apart from blocked roads slowly becoming unblocked, the continuing search for African athletes on the run, and lots of Games volunteers wondering what they'll do with those awful aqua and orange t-shirts they were forced to wear.
As I suspected, Australia kicked ass. Home ground advantage + Sporting Dominance = Ridiculous Medal Tally. I mean, we're only 20 medals short of scoring as many medals as the UK and Canada combined. And that's with the UK splintered into all the smaller nations of the Isles. Makes me a bit embarrased, really. Like a thuggish kid that invites you to his house just to beat on you.
The closing ceremony I actually thought less of than the opening. The closing ceremony was just a rock concert (just?!?) while the opener had a bit more to it. He says, having lost interest after ah hour or so and barely watching from that point. I did hear the fireworks from outside tho, and that made me look back for the finale, which was cool I suppose.
The preview for India looked amazing! Their opening and closing ceremonies should be spectacular. I like their Tiger mascot. Kicks our stupid black cockatoo's ass.

Yup, the India sections rocked. I can't wait to see what they're going to put on. It's going to be nice to see a non-Western nation (accepting of course that geographically Australia isn't a Western nation but you know what I mean) does with teh Games. Last one I think was Singapore or something, but I don't remember it at all. If the 'preview' was anything to go by then it should be stunning.