Commonwealth Games: Red arrows and a raging bull kick off games in opening ceremony
Channel: News 360 Tv
Date: 2022-07-30

Commonwealth Games opening ceremony delivers welcome dose of sporting innocence
Nobody can argue with any conviction that the Commonwealth Games represent the apogee of athletic endeavour. This is a spectacle where the lawn bowls team from Niue, a tiny lump of coral in the south Pacific, is captained by the nation’s 54-year-old premier, and where the delegation from Norfolk Island features a sixth-generation descendant of the mutiny on HMS Bounty. 

It is roughly what a repertory theatre production of the Olympics might look like.
Pole vaulters from the Isle of Man, swimmers from St Helena, beach volleyballers from Tuvalu: it is the strangest of smorgasbords here in Birmingham, a tutorial in the last vestiges of empire. And yet this opening ceremony felt, in its eccentric way, like a timely expression of sporting purity.

For here were 5,000 athletes congregating solely for the Corinthian enterprise of it all, conscious that in 11 days’ time, their names might never be heard again.

If this sounds utopian, then that is because idealism in sport has taken a battering of late. Across the Atlantic, Donald Trump was hosting a golf series glorifying £40 million signing-on fees and £100,000 cheques for last-place finishes. Up the M6, Cristiano Ronaldo was sulking about having to abase himself at Manchester United for another season on £360,000 a week.

It all looks profoundly ugly when juxtaposed with the story of Cyrille Tchatchet, the weightlifter competing for England after eight years of homelessness and depression, or the struggle of Tayamika Chang’anamuno, dropped from the three-strong Malawi swim team because her federation could only afford plane tickets for two.
The Commonwealths promise to deliver a similarly escapist rush. At a time when everybody is dreading an avalanche of financial calamity, there is a certain joyous diversion to be found in watching sprinters from Kiribati or boxers from Papua New Guinea. It might be tempting to scoff that it is all inconsequential, that there are more pressing issues, but that is precisely the point. These Games revel in being a theatre of the gloriously absurd.

Even Thursday night’s ceremony at the Alexander Stadium, where athletes paraded around a giant mechanical bull signifying this proud industrial city, followed some bizarre scripting. 
What other event could possibly fit Malala Yousafzai and Lenny Henry on the same bill? Steven Knight, the Peaky Blinders creator and artistic mastermind behind this show, also found a novel way of introducing the Prince of Wales, arranging for him to arrive in his own blue Aston Martin – the same DB6 model that he received from the Queen on his 21st birthday.


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