HOYLAKE (ENGLAND) : It is not just those outside the Commonwealth who wonder what the Commonwealth Games mean at this stage.
On Saturday, the Sydney Morning Herald ran an essay with the headline: “Why we should still love the Commonwealth Games.”
If the sports-loving Australians, who have topped the medal table for the last six editions of the competition, feel the need to convince themselves, imagine how the unaffiliated see it or, more accurately, don’t see it.
For most of the sporting planet, the Commonwealth Games, 11 days of competition that opened late yesterday in Glasgow, Scotland, and end Aug 3, are a quadrennial irrelevance. They are a curious colonial vestige with some of the pomp and circumstance of the Olympics minus most of the heavy hitters although not, in this instance, Usain Bolt.
The three nations who won the most medals at the last Summer Olympics, in 2012 in London — the United States, China and Russia — do not participate in the Commonwealth version or pay millions, much less billions, to broadcast them.
Yet the Commonwealth Games press on into the 21st century, and ultimately it is for the states and micro-states that continue to take part in this festival to decide whether it remains worth the expense and trouble in a landscape where athletes have plenty of more geopolitically coherent forums in which to compete.
The Commonwealth Games do have more history than most. This will be the 20th edition. The first was staged in 1930 in Canada, in Hamilton, Ontario.
It was called the British Empire Games until 1950, then the British Empire and Commonwealth Games, then the British Commonwealth Games and, since 1978, simply the Commonwealth Games.
The name has morphed with the times and the sensibilities, and the competition in Glasgow comes at a watershed moment politically with the Scottish referendum on independence looming on Sept 18.
But then Scotland, like Wales and Northern Ireland, has long expressed its independence in sporting terms and will, as usual, have its own team at the Commonwealth Games.
The British Olympian Euan Burton will thus compete for Scotland in judo while his wife, Gemma Gibbons, an Olympic silver medalist in 2012, will compete for England.
There will be 71 delegations in Glasgow competing in 17 sports. They represent six continents, although not much of a continent in some cases (Guyana is the only representative from South America).
Still, it is quite a geographic and demographic footprint, encompassing India, with more than 1.2 billion inhabitants, and Saint Helena, a British overseas territory in the South Atlantic, with a population of about 4,000.
The main nations in sporting terms at the Commonwealth Games remain England and Australia, whose rivalry might not be as piquant as it used to be but is still a rivalry.
Both will have much of their top talent in Glasgow.
England expects to have the star distance runner Mo Farah and the cycling star Bradley Wiggins. Farah is the reigning Olympic, world and European champion in the 5,000 and 10,000 meters. Wiggins won the 2012 Tour de France but is not taking part in this year’s Tour and plans to race in Glasgow both in the road time trial and indoors on the track.
The English also have an emerging figure in Katarina Johnson-Thompson, who is expected to follow the path of the Olympic champion Jessica Ennis-Hill and become a global threat in the heptathlon.
The Commonwealth Games is often a fine, less-floodlit springboard to higher altitudes for young athletes. Consider Cathy Freeman, the 2000 Olympic champion in the 400 meters who first ran for Australia at age 16 at the 1990 Commonwealth Games in Auckland, New Zealand.
The Australians are sending the hurdler Sally Pearson, the cyclist Anna Meares, and what should be a powerful swim team, led by James Magnussen, the reigning world champion in the 100-meter freestyle, although he lost the 100 to his teammate Cameron McEvoy at the Australian Trials.
Magnussen and the Australians belly-flopped in the pool at the London Olympics, failing to win a single individual gold in swimming and making other waves with revelations of sleeping pill abuse, hard partying and questionable management.
Swimming Australia has since changed leadership, hiring a new president, the former America’s Cup winner John Bertrand, and a new head coach, the Dutchman Jacco Verhaeren, who made his name working with the Olympic medalists Pieter van den Hoogenband and Inge de Bruijn.
Verhaeren and the Australians will be under the microscope in Glasgow — even if the much more compelling swim meet this year should be the Pan Pacific Championships next month, when Missy Franklin, Katie Ledecky, Ryan Lochte, Michael Phelps and the Americans will take on the Australians in their home waters in Gold Coast, Queensland.
Even Bolt, the world’s fastest man on land, is only making a cameo in Glasgow. He plans to run for Jamaica only in the final of the 4x100 relay.
The leading women’s sprinter of this era, Shelley-Ann Fraser-Pryce of Jamaica, has the same plan and will thus not get a rematch with the young Trinidadian Michelle-Lee Ahye, who beat her last week in the Diamond League meet in Glasgow.
David Rudisha, the Kenyan who broke the 800-meter world record on one of the most memorable nights of the London Olympics, will run in the Commonwealth Games although none of the medalists from last year’s world championships in the 800 that he missed will be there to challenge him.
But there are sports in which the Commonwealth Games feel much less like an exhibition or tuneup and much more like a global peak. Most of them are non-Olympic events, though.
There is netball, the women’s sport that has long been dominated by the Australians and New Zealanders but in which the English are a threat.
There is lawn bowls — yes, lawn bowls — and there is squash, the racket sport in which the reigning women’s world champion, Laura Massaro, and men’s world champion, Nick Matthew, are English and the world’s top-ranked women’s player, Nicol David, is Malaysian.
Rugby sevens, a sport that is joining the Olympic program in 2016 in Rio, also has a strong field in Glasgow, as do men’s and women’s field hockey.
But even if these Commonwealth Games do strike a chord, their future still looks fuzzy, and not just from outside the Commonwealth.
“Glasgow may be the last hurrah of an event once called the Empire Games,” wrote Sean Ingle in the Guardian newspaper in Britain on Sunday.
“Yet it will not be surprising if even skeptics find themselves experiencing a sort of London 2012 aftershock: not as intense, or as seismic, or as important, but giddy and enjoyable nonetheless.” NYT