BIRMINGHAM, England — What a difference in one year. It was just 12 months ago that former University of Victoria Vikes rugby great Nathan Hirayama co-carried the Canadian flag into an eerily empty National Stadium in Tokyo in the opening ceremony of the delayed 2020 Olympics.
A post-restrictions capacity crowd of 32,000 gathered at Alexander Stadium in Birmingham on Thursday night for the upbeat and joyous opening ceremony of the 2022 Commonwealth Games, produced by Steven Knight, creator of the hit Birmingham-set Netflix series Peaky Blinders. More than 50 Island or Island-based athletes are among the 276-athlete Canadian team that is competing here over the next 11 days.
That is the short story. The longer history of one-third of the world is reflected in the Commonwealth Games. Twenty-eight years ago in Victoria, the 1994 Games welcomed back South Africa following an apartheid-era banishment of 36 years, and said goodbye to Hong Kong with 1997 looming and left it to a fate that is still uncertain. Runner Cathy Freeman, heralding an ongoing reckoning, carried both the Australian and Aboriginal flags during her victory laps at Centennial Stadium before lighting the cauldron six years later to open the 2000 Sydney Olympics in an act of reconciliation still reverberating today.
Birmingham native Denise Lewis, both the 1994 Victoria Commonwealth Games and 2000 Sydney Olympic heptathlon champion, was the final runner who handed the Queen’s Baton to Prince Charles, who read a message from the Queen enclosed in the baton. The Queen’s message talked of “memorable shared relationships in a city symbolic of the Commonwealth.”
Indeed, the story is still unfolding as the Empire struck back in the opening ceremony in a majority minority city in which two thirds of its residents hail from coloured Commonwealth nations. The cheers for India, Pakistan and Jamaica, which have provided tens of thousands of immigrants to the West Midlands, rivalled those for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and behind only host England.
Pakistani female rights activist and Brummie (as residents of Birmingham are called) Malala Yousafzai delivered a tribute to her adopted town: “When I came to this city, I had never heard its name. But I would come to understand it.”
These are the first major multi-sport Games to feature more women’s events than men’s events, and the first to fully integrate Para and able-bodied events contested side-by-side and counting equally in the medals table. That was represented by Canadian wheelchair racer Josh Cassidy of Ottawa, who was co-Canadian flagbearer in the opening ceremony with Olympic and Commonwealth Games gold-medallist weightlifter Maude Charron of Rimouski, Que.
Cassidy will be joined in the Birmingham Commonwealth Games by three Victoria City Elite Club Para athletes — David Johnson in the T12 100 metres, 2019 Lima Para Pan Am Games silver medallist and Tokyo Paralympics bronze medallist Zachary Gingras in the T38 100 metres and 2016 Rio Paralympics bronze medallist Tristan Smyth in the T54 1,500 metres and marathon.
“Full inclusion is exciting and it’s going to be amazing to meet [able-bodied] athletes I’ve never talked to before,” said Tokyo Paralympics swimmer Nicholas Bennett from Parksville.
Gay activist and Olympic and Commonwealth Games champion diver Tom Daley of England brought the Queen’s Baton into the stadium, following its year-long journey around the Commonwealth, to pointedly highlight that two-thirds of the nations within the Commonwealth still outlaw homosexuality. It seems sport, politics and activism have become intrinsically linked from Colin Kaepernick on.
Ironically, the Commonwealth Games hope to be in the forefront of change. That’s quite something for a Games that some describe as a relic of the past and symbol of colonialism. But hometown Brummie band Duran Duran closed the ceremony Thursday with their song Ordinary World and perhaps expressed it best when they sang: “I don’t cry for yesterday.”
Neither do the heirs of Empire, who have gathered again for their quadrennial sporting celebration in this multi-cultural, multi-coloured city whose demographic is the direct product of Empire.
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