XVIII Commonwealth Games Blog

XVIII Commonwealth Games
Blog: 18th March 2006

XVIII Commonwealth Games Blog: 18th March 2006

One of the odd things about being a journalist at a major international event like the Commonwealth Games is that, despite being right at the epicentre of activity you often feel like the rest of the world knows more about what’s going on than you do.

At every event like this I enjoy sampling sports I’ve never seen before, and I had a chance to watch three yesterday. First was boxing, which has never been a personal favourite among the disciplines, so I wanted to see how it goes. Frankly, it’s not very exciting - and certainly, it’s nothing compared to the brutal professional branch of the sport. Here, it’s all carefully orchestrated, the boxers are heavily padded, and they are scored for how often they can connect a punch, not for how hard it hits. Lots of starting and stopping ensues. I got bored after one match and went next door to the badminton.

This was much more exciting than I’d expected. Dressed in tennis gear, the players obviously don’t need the strength of most sports (or even of tennis players, who had a much larger court to contend with). But they do need serious endurance and astonishingly quick eye-hand coordination. It was fascinating to watch them use the length of the racquet to reach for the shuttlecock and whip it back at their opponent. The men’s singles were pretty vicious matches - every hit was a slam. And there are clear regional differences in playing styles, most notably the little flick of the wrist the African players add to every stroke.

Next up was rugby sevens - and I had to do an interview with a UK radio network as I walked to the stadium. The problem was that the matches only take 20 minutes, so I knew that during my walk the England-Fiji match had probably been decided. I had to ask the programme host in the UK who won before I could report the news on his station!

Inside the Telstra Dome the atmosphere was electric. The short nature of the matches means the day progresses rapidly from showdown to showdown, and the scrappy nature of the play means you can’t take your eyes from the pitch for a second. It was absolutely riveting to watch, the scores shifted so quickly that you never really knew who might win, no matter what the point spread. In the end, New Zealand won the gold medal simply by outplaying everyone else. They celebrated with a spirited haka and an extremely lively press conference in which they good-naturedly teased the English players they’d just beaten.

Rich Cline

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