In writing about public opinion as measured by our Auspoll research, I try only to describe the findings, discuss what they may mean socially and politically, add any insights I can. My own opinions have no business here.
This week I’m making an exception because there’s an elephant in the room, he’s getting on my wick with his noisy trumpeting of confected national pride and he’s wearing a swag of medals round his neck as though they mean something.
I refer of course to the glorified Schools District Gymkhana known as the Commonwealth Games, formerly the Empire Games, before that, even more accurately, the British Empire Games. This one is best because the whole charade ceased being worth organising, watching or taking part in when the old Empire slipped into history – WWII at the most flattering estimate.
My case is simple. There are nearly 200 nations in the modern world. There are 54 in the ‘Commonwealth’ – which incidentally share no common wealth, preferential trade arrangements, military alliances or anything else much, aside from fast fading history as subjugated colonies.
But it’s not just that we hold an international athletics meet and forget to invite three quarters of the other countries – it’s the ones we don’t invite. If you want a crack at a medal at international level and could take out every serious competitive threat, where would you start? Say, the USA. They have some fair athletes. And they’re huge. Let’s face it, they flog everyone on medal counts in open competition. They’re gone.
China? One country sure, but going on a quarter of the world by itself. Again, hard to beat in a range of events and only getting more so with rising prosperity and economic power. Out.
Also Mexico. There’s another 110 million or so we don’t have to worry about. While we’re down there, keep going. South America. Not all of it! There’s a fly speck on the northern coast called Guyana. They can come. The rest, gonsky. And since we’re wiping whole continents, Europe too. We don’t want you. Or you, Russia. Scandinavia. Japan, Korea, most of SE Asia. A good chunk of Africa too.
Not a lot left is there? Suits us. We’ll take on the best the world can throw at us (the parts of it in Samao, Swaziland, Singapore and the Seychelles) and just watch those medals pile up. (Ok, Bahamas, Barbados, Brunei and Belize are there too, but there’s more people in Western Sydney than these combined so we’re not scared of them. True.)
None of this is to denigrate the extreme hard work, dedication and talent of the athletes competing. Nor to ignore that many of them are world class and medal contenders in real international meets. It’s just that this isn’t one – it’s more like a training warm-up.
The whole thing is screamingly absurd and I really thought by now most of us would see it that way. Not for the first time my fellow Aussie Aussie Aussies have disappointed me. Seems if there’s a stack of medals and a comp we can dominate we don’t mind if it’s purely bogus.
This week we asked Australians whether they thought the Commonwealth Games are still relevant and it turns out many do – 46 per cent to 37 who say irrelevant. But you can see where it’s headed when you note that among 18 to 24 year olds this drops to 36 and rises steadily to 51 among the 65 plus set. Even half of these don’t care.
When we asked if people are interested in watching the Games things got a bit more real. Only 45 per cent interested (only 10 highly) compared to 55 per cent uninterested (21 ‘completely uninterested’). Again, this interest tracked up from a dismal 31 per cent among our youngest respondents and peaked at 52 with the oldest. Maybe it’s nostalgia for empire.
Lastly we asked people to rank six different types of sporting achievement from most impressive to least, including winning a World Cup (eg FIFA), Olympic gold medal, major domestic premiership (AFL, NRL) major international tour event (US Open, Tour de France, Wimbledon), Commonwealth gold or a Test series (Ashes, Bledisloe).
The result tells a story – Olympic first, Commonwealth last. The moral is it’s time to admit the old British Empire was in fact the one before last. As a global hegemony, the USA pushed it into history long ago and is itself on its way to being supplanted by the rising Asian giants – China and India. We might as well have a sports carnival against countries formerly invaded by the Ottoman Turks.
It’s way past time to give it away and only send our teams to real international contests where they compete with the world. Then if one of our athletes wins a medal, I will be first on my feet cheering and truly proud.
So much better than ‘mate you caned that Belize guy in the final.’ Oi.
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