The Queen will attend opening ceremony of event that presents an invigorating antidote to some of the grating commercialism of mainstream sport.
It was a papal document that encapsulated the standard to which Glasgow’s Commonwealth Games aspire.
“A place of renown,” read the Vatican’s edict of 1451, establishing a university in the city, “where the air is mild and the victuals are plenty.” Truly, Pope Nicholas V could not have put it any better than if he had been describing a summer’s night on Sauciehall Street.
For Glasgow, aptly for a place once heralded as the ‘Second City of the Empire’, finds itself enveloped by a Commonwealths fever.
Not, mercifully, the gastroenteritic variety that plagued the last Games in Delhi – although the athletes’ village in the East End has reported more than 50 cases of the norovirus – but the same avid, fervent, immersive fascination with the spectacle that marked the 2006 instalment in Melbourne.
After the debacle of the 1986 Games in Edinburgh, crippled by boycotts and doused day and night by rain, Glasgow intends to present a prettier face to the world ahead of Scotland’s defining political crossroads.
It seems naive to expect that Alex Salmond, leader of the Scottish National Party, will not try to co-opt a tartan gold rush for his own ends in September’s referendum, even if he disclosed on Tuesday a “self-denying ordinance” not to do so. But the charged political atmosphere is a mere symptom of the generalised insanity that sport engenders in this country, as we are able to call it for another eight weeks at least.
The security, for a start, is suffocatingly intense. The Crowne Plaza by the Clyde has been turned into a near-impregnable fortress, with no vehicles allowed within a 400-yard radius, while the protocols for Sir Bradley Wiggins’s press conference would have embarrassed a G8 summit. Where else could you have found a set of snipers trained upon the roof of a lawn bowls club?
As Australia’s 417-strong delegation set up camp here, one realised there was a lasting relevance about an event whose detractors claim is little more than an anachronistic egg-and-spoon race. Even the Queen needs no persuading to be present on Wednesday night at the opening ceremony, whereas the London Olympics required the gimmickry of her parachute jump with Daniel Craig.
As for the closing ceremony in 2012, she asked Prince Harry to turn up instead. To her, the significance of the Commonwealth Games is a fundamental extension of her conviction, shared by the majority in Glasgow, that the Commonwealth itself still matters.
For the panoply of nations once subjects of British imperial rule has since 1949 formed a quite extraordinary institution, where former masters and servants are mutually appeased, reconciled into a body of equal partnership.
True, it brings no trade privileges, possesses no executive authority, and confers a sometimes uncomfortable veneer of legitimacy upon despotic regimes such as Swaziland, the planet’s last remaining absolute monarchy.
But it would be churlish to pretend that the Commonwealth has never served as an arbiter for good, not least in campaigning for tougher sanctions against apartheid South Africa, or in pressing Robert Mugabe to institute reforms until he took Zimbabwe out of the club.
Whether it is a workable template for intense sporting competition is even more of a moot point. Is it not a touch disproportionate, for example, that the Isle of Man has sent eight artistic gymnasts? Clearly, the parallel bars are de rigueur in Douglas these days.
But for all the procession of Nauruan weightlifters, Anguillan cyclists and clay pigeon shooters from the Falkland Islands, it pays to remember that the notion of arbitrary exclusivity in sport is hardly a novel one. The phenomenon of the Ryder Cup, no less, is built upon the baffling incongruity of Englishmen cheering Spaniards, and dyed-in-the-wool Ukip voters indulging in beery chants of ‘Europe!’
Every four years there is a temptation to paint the Commonwealths as a daft historical construct, even though they shift in 2018 to the Gold Coast in Australia, the country that cherishes them like no other, before a likely 2022 date in Durban.
Their future already looks prosperous, even before a Glasgow Games almost guaranteed, based upon the powerful sell-it-and-they-will-come principle of multi-sport spectaculars in Britain, to be an unalloyed success.
To observe the frenetic energy of the eve-of-Games preparations on Tuesday was to realise that they are, at one level, an Olympics overspill. Many of the volunteers have simply swapped their purple garb in London for a red strip in Glasgow, desperate to recapture the spirit of ebullience that prevailed two years ago. “I’ve taken two weeks’ holiday,” one said. “I wouldn’t swap this for anything.”
Aesthetically, the Games could scarcely ask for a more beguiling backcloth than Glasgow in this languorous late-summer heat. Forget the old archetypes in the 2010 Thomas Cook guide, which portrayed a city riven by religious sectarianism, full of council estates not to be approached without 10,000-volt stun guns, and blighted by a tobacco-heavy, drink-fuelled, sugar-rich lifestyle that was “notoriously the least healthy in Europe”.
Look instead towards the words of Daniel Defoe, who wrote in 1707, the year he was dispatched to Scotland as an English spy soliciting support for the union: “Glasgow is, indeed, a very fine city. The four principal streets are the fairest for breadth I have ever seen in one city together. ’tis the cleanest and beautifullest, and best-built city in the world, London excepted.”
If it was good enough for the author of Robinson Crusoe, then the city ought to be a fitting host for the members of the Commonwealth, comprising so many of the remote Pacific islands that inspired the ultimate castaway story.
Given that London hosted the Games in 1934, when the last vestiges of empire were still just about intact, who better to collect the baton 90 years later than Glaswegians? In Victorian Britain, Glasgow functioned not solely as the engine of shipbuilding, but of the locomotive and chemical industries, too, as mass immigration from the Highlands and Ireland swelled the population from 250,000 in 1840 to 750,000 by the turn of the century.
Take a look at the city from the Clyde, and one sees this contrast between a gleaming, gentrified present and a harsher past of four-to-a-room tenements rendered in sharp relief. There, the Hydro, stage for the Commonwealths basketball and also the world’s third busiest music venue behind the O2 and New York’s Madison Square Garden, sits mere blocks away from the abandoned shipyards, untouched by all this yuppification to stand forsaken and unloved.
Emblematic of the dereliction are the Red Roof Flats, the stark tower blocks adjacent to Celtic Park, which Games organisers originally planned to blow up as part of Wednesday night’s opening ceremony.
According to the council, it would be “symbolic of a changing Glasgow”, until a hot blast of public outrage convinced them that laying waste to a portion of the city might prove a peculiarly macabre piece of theatre. Wisely, they have settled upon Rod Stewart and Lulu to compensate.
Whether in music or literature, Glasgow has not always been a byword for joie de vivre, and yet last night this felt a city imbued with that very sentiment. Gordon Strachan, the Scotland manager, is a man of such gruffness that when invited by one football reporter to offer a “quick word”, famously replied: “Velocity”.
But even he, gazing out at Hampden Park ahead of an athletics programme encompassing Usain Bolt, Mo Farah and Scottish poster-girl Eilidh Child, was not impervious to a few stirrings of pride. “It’s a chance for Scotland to use sport as a tool to help us,” Strachan said. “You never plan for these things, but sometimes they end up wonderful.”
That sense of wonder resides in the fact that the Commonwealths still present an invigorating antidote to some of the grating commercialism of mainstream sport, an opportunity for athletes from the marginalised provinces of squash and bowls to earn a share of the exposure.
Politically, the Commonwealth is so resilient that nations including Madagascar and Algeria, never part of the British Empire in the first place, are on the waiting list for inclusion. “We are not the world,” explains secretary-general Kamalesh Sharma. “But we are a microcosm of it.”
So, now is not the time to scoff or to scorn. Instead, it is a chance to be intoxicated over these next 11 days by everything from the Brownlee brothers to breaststrokers from the British Virgin Islands, to savour the delicacies of sport’s strangest smorgasbord.
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