So the Commonwealth games came to an end last weekend. If you don't know what the CWGs are (as twitter calls them otherwise the 140 characters would get a whole lot smaller), they are a kind of Olympics lite. A strange gathering of countries who used to be part of the British Empire and a few like Mozambique who weren’t but apparently are part of the Commonwealth. It is basically a chance for British, Australian and Canadian athletes to win gold because their American and Russian and other European cousins are not competing. And because it is the British Empire games the sports are all things we used to be jolly good at, like croquet and eton fives that sort of thing.
The Brits get terribly excited by this event as it reminds them of their glorious colonial past when Britania ruled the waves.
But for me they are a sham. The clue to my chagrin is in the name, common wealth. Watching athletes from far flung corners of the colonies trying to compete with maybe a fifth of the funding that the richer nations give their athletes suggest there is no common wealth, there is no shared pot that everyone gets their fingers in.
The Brits love a loser, so they loved watching plucky Johnny Foreigner trail in last, hours behind the winner but ask yourself this, why are they coming in so far behind? Maybe because The British Empire took what it could from but give very little to these countries.
Is that really worth celebrating every 4 years?
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