The Decline and Fall of the British Empire Games
by Simon Stephenson

MANCHESTER, ENGLAND — When I was eight years old, the Commonwealth Games came to my hometown of Edinburgh, Scotland. A month before they began, a woman with a clipboard appeared at our primary school assembly, offering free training shoes in exchange for a couple of hours of singing, dancing and generally looking cherubic at the opening ceremony.

Being young, we did not know anything about the games. We didn't know that they were a quadrennial sporting event and to have them in your town was supposed to be a great honor. Nevertheless, already in the first throes of a fierce brand addiction which would last the best part of a decade, when she muttered the magic word "Adidas" we all rushed to sign up.

An anemic bunch with pudding-bowl home haircuts and gaps where our two front teeth ought to be, however, we largely flunked the auditions: we sung off-key, fought with other children who encroached onto our dancing territory, and generally looked more feral than cherubic. Still, to fail to make the cut, as all but two of our number did, was a major disappointment: Adidas trainers did not grow on trees but rather arrived, once a year at best, beneath the Christmas one.

This week, on television, an altogether more photogenic group of children performed at the opening ceremony of the 17th Commonwealth Games in Manchester, England.

The corporate footballing might of Manchester United notwithstanding, the rainy, post-industrial town of Manchester is not a city one readily associates with sport. Were the games to give events a local theme, the program might have included the four-hundred metre hurdles (whilst clutching a stolen VCR and being pursued by a police Alsatian), pole vaulting (out of Her Majesty's Prison, Strangeways), and shooting (up).

Nevertheless, the opening ceremony was a fine one. Fireworks exploded, the children danced, and the Queen, well, waved. Seasoned royal-watchers commented on her waving technique, found it a little more jaunty, marginally less imperial, than before. Some even went as far as to speculate that, as the Queen mother passed away earlier this year, mightn't the Queen's thoughts be turning toward relinquishing the laborious stately duties of Commonwealth CEO and moving into the now-vacant position of nation's favorite grandmother?

For the moment, however, she remains the commander-in-chief, monarch to every competitor at what were originally known at their inception in 1930 as the British Empire Games. The idea behind the games seems to have been to allow Britain, and perhaps some of her better-behaved colonies, to win some medals. This end was achieved, with great success, by not inviting the Americans, Russians or Europeans.

Further, as the Antipodeans and Africans quickly showed themselves to be better than ourselves at most sports, the program was modified to include sports we Brits might be expected to do well at. Step forward table tennis, synchronized swimming and lawn bowling, a litany of pedantry seemingly hand-picked to allow obsessive Brits a chance to stand on the winner's podium.

Nonetheless, it makes for great daytime television. No more re-runs of Oprah or watching Australian soap opera "Neighbors" twice a day for us, these summer holidays we are glued to the Commonwealth Games. We watch netball (basketball for people not sufficiently co-ordinated to have mastered the art of bouncing; imagine the NBA, sans skill, athleticism or glamour), wrestling (WWF without the costumes but with the bonus of genuine physical contact) and the discus competition (actual grown men and women compete to see who can throw a heavy metal frisbee the furthest).

In fact, we watch whatever is on, our critical faculties dulled by the warm weather and the sight of a young woman our own age being judged on her ability to writhe around a swimming pool to a backing track of "oriental"-themed music. Occasionally we are genuinely impressed; we see a man from Grenada run the hundred metres in a little under 10 seconds, or a Guyanan woman tumble gracefully from the high diving board, but mostly we watch with a bemused smile on our faces. A bemused smile on our faces and a faintly uneasy feeling in our stomach.

We have this uneasy feeling because those of us who paid attention in high school history class understand that when the Women's Gymnastics semi-finals finish, and the first item on the subsequent six o'clock news is about violent unrest in Mugabe's Zimbabwe, the events are not entirely unrelated.

For the Commonwealth Games are perhaps the last obnoxiously proud vestige of that thankfully largely-dismantled monstrosity, the British Empire — a force that conquered and plundered with a gusto not seen since an enterprising young Scandinavian suggested that if they only made the boat longer, they could get more men and swords into it.

And so when the commentators talk wistfully of the games as encompassing a spirit of sharing and love for our Commonwealth brothers and sisters, we cannot help but think of our great museums, only now sheepishly beginning to return plundered artifacts to the people who hold them sacred. Cannot help but think of the continuing bloodshed in Zimbabwe. In Sierra Leone. In Sri Lanka.

Is it fair to let a sporting event be tarnished by its political context? Shouldn't we just be marveling at the lawn-bowling prowess of the Malaysians, the lethal judo-chop of the amateur martial artist from Zambia?

The truth, of course, is that from Phidippides running 26 miles from the battlefield at Marathon to Athens, to Jesse Owens winning four gold medals at Berlin, sport has always been inseparable from the politics that surround it. Even when my classmates and I were 8 years old and consumed with indignation that we would not be receiving any new trainers, it was political: Those 1986 games in Edinburgh were a washout.

Thirty-two of 48 invited nations did not attend what are now known as "The Boycott Games" to protest the Thatcher government's refusal to take economic sanctions against the apartheid regime of South Africa.

Being 8, of course, we hardly noticed; we were too busy inspecting our two selected classmates' new shoes. Every day after school for a whole month they'd gone to a distant church hall to practice their singing and dancing under the fearsome tutelage of an ex-army drill instructor.

Their reward? A pair of deck shoes. The kind you got from the army and navy store. That did not have "Adidas" written on them. Anywhere.

When we, the gap-toothed malco-ords who had failed the audition, saw that, we laughed like we'd won gold in the under-10's lawn-bowling event. Sixteen years and four Games later, we still wonder if there isn't something a little funny about the Commonwealth Games.

E-mail Simon Stephenson at writesimon@hotmail.com.

— graphic by D.P. Barsam (barsam@hotpop.com)