by The last time the Commonwealth Games struggled to find a replacement host, after Durban pulled out of the event in 2017, it got help from an unlikely source: Buckingham Palace. An insider takes the story. “The Palace went to the government and said: ‘It’s the Queen’s Jubilee in 2022, you need to do something,'” he tells the Guardian. “UK Sport got a call there too. There was real pressure and that made Birmingham happen.”
On Monday the Commonwealth Games plunged into yet another crisis after the Gold Coast withdrew its bid for 2026 – just four months after Victoria also pulled out. This time, however, there will be no call from the palace and the UK government to ride to the rescue with £594m in its pocket. Just 16 months after the success of Birmingham 2022, organizers are once again facing serious questions about the future of the event.
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Some of the challenges it faces are longstanding and vertical. Even the best PR agency in the world, you think, would have difficulty rebranding an event that started in 1930 as the Empire Games for the British colonies. And hosting a sporting event with more than 5,000 athletes is becoming increasingly expensive. Birmingham 2022 cost approximately £778m. Victoria 2026 was predicted to be four times that when organizers pulled the plug.
It doesn’t help when TV revenue is a fraction of the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup, and when the threat of terrorism is ever-present. Security costs for the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney were $250m (£198m). According to Athens, four years later and after 9/11, they topped $1.6bn (£1.25bn).
To make matters more difficult for organizers, economists have often found that the supposed benefits of hosting mega-sporting events are overstated. Before hosting the 2002 Winter Olympics, for example, the Utah state government predicted it would generate 35,000 job-years. However, after crunching employment data from 1990 and 2009 in Utah, economists Robert Baade and Victor A Matheson found “no discernible increase in employment before or after the Olympics”.
Their conclusion is worth noting. “Given that the federal government spent $342m directly on the 2002 Olympics and at least another $1.1bn on infrastructure improvements leading up to the Games, that’s about $300,000 in federal government spending per job was created,” they say.
“Indeed, these results lend credence to a rule of thumb often used by economists who study mega-events: if one wants to know the true economic impact of an event, take whatever number the promoters are plotting and move the decimal point. one place to the left.”
Any future Commonwealth Games must surely be smaller and cheaper to survive. Assuming, of course, that there is a future. Insiders insist that preliminary talks have taken place with four regions regarding hosting in 2026 and will give an update in the new year. But crucially India, the biggest fish in the Commonwealth outside the UK and Australia, doesn’t seem to be taking the bait.
There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, there is still a lot of friction between India and the Commonwealth Games Federation after the 2010 Delhi Games were canceled amid allegations of corruption and financial mismanagement. An Indian parliamentary report on those Games also found a “complete failure of management” within the organization and said the Indian government had “virtually failed” to run the event.
Recently, India threatened to pull out of the 2022 Games if there was no shooting event. For most observers, Narenda Modi’s government is now more focused on a much bigger goal – hosting the Olympics in 2036.
In fairness to the CGF it deserves praise for trying to innovate the Games on many occasions, including by bringing eSports to Birmingham. Attention can also be paid to the way the event attracts a wider range of athletes from superstars to enthusiastic amateurs.
Related: ‘Meaningless exercise’: mixed feelings about Games legacy in bankrupt Birmingham
But it will be a challenge to find a host for 2026 in a short period of time. And since most international sports federations have already booked events for that year, it may be more difficult than usual to attract big names. In Birmingham many stars – including Olympic and world champions Andre de Grasse, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce and Shericka Jackson – stayed out.
No wonder people close to the Commonwealth Games fear the worst. “I always thought the Games would go on until the centenary in 2030 and then stop,” says the insider who fondly remembers the day Buckingham Palace came calling. “But my real view is that we have seen the last Games under this format. At best it will look much smaller in size, scale and interest.”
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