Merrier and Less Stern

MIKE ROWBOTTOM CHIEF FEATURE WRITER, INSIDETHEGAMES

Merrier and Less Stern

The anxiety caused by burning flames at the Olympics would never be seen at the Commonwealth Games, as Mike Rowbottom explains.

For a start, we want no naked flames at the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games.

Like millions of other TV viewers, I recently watched the Buckingham Palace balcony celebrations marking Queen Elizabeth

II’s Platinum Jubilee, with the “perfect in powder blue” matriarch leaning only slightly on her stick as she acknowledged the intense affection being radiated towards her by thousands of flag waving Britons jamming The Mall.

Standing at her right hand, face almost as scarlet in the heat as the gilded uniform covering his no longer polo-lissom body, her eldest son, now 73, must have viewed the familiar scene with resignation.

In a way, all of Prince Charles’ life has been about waiting.

So, he will have been in his element during the Opening Ceremony of the Gold Coast 2018

Commonwealth Games as he stood by - and continued standing by - to receive his mother’s words of wisdom contained in the Queen’s baton, which had come to the end of its long and winding relay journey through her realm. "Very much connected" was the key phrase awaited.

It was certainly apposite at that moment.

The baton, for several awkward seconds, refused to yield as the President of the

Commonwealth Games Federation, Dame

Louise Martin, sought to open it. "The ancient stories told by the people of

Australia tell us that even though we are far away, we are all very much connected," the

Prince was eventually able to announce, setting the 21st Commonwealth Games in motion.

Four years and one pandemic later - we earnestly hope - the event that came into being 92 years ago as the British Empire

Games is about to start for the 22nd time. It will be in England for the third time - on this occasion in Birmingham.

The 1930 British Empire Games were held in Hamilton, Ontario with the dictum - approved by the event’s instigator Bobby Robinson - that, compared to the Olympics, they "should be merrier and less stern and will substitute the stimulus of novel adventure for the pressure of international rivalry".

If you were seeking an emblem of contrast between the Olympics and the Commonwealth Games, you need look no further than that Opening Ceremony, where the awkward hiatus was greeted by the chairman of Gold Coast 2018 Peter Beattie with laughter so merry that he almost fell backwards off the presenting dais.

The incident epitomised the longstanding characterisation of the Commonwealth Games as the "Friendly Games". It is hard to imagine an Olympic faux pas being received in similarly relaxed fashion.

Inevitably, minds went back to the weirdly similar occurrence at the Commonwealth Games Opening Ceremony in Glasgow four years earlier, when the then-President of the CGF, Prince Imran of Malaysia, managed to cut his thumb open as he struggled for 30 seconds or so to release the Queen’s message from the baton that had just been passed to him by Sir Chris Hoy.

The beefy cyclist had attempted to help in the operation as the Prince, who insisted afterwards that he had practiced opening the baton "two or three times", continued not to do the trick.

The Queen gave little away as she awaited - and eventually received - her own message. "I had a little bit of a problem, there was a little bit of collateral damage," the Prince said at the next day’s media briefing. "I cut my thumb on that wonderful piece of Scottish engineering, but it was my fault. I’m not sure Chris Hoy helped but all’s well that ends well. I raised a laugh."

In my experience, Olympic Opening Ceremonies have been occasions of high anxiety. The first I attended, at the Barcelona 1992 Games, had intricately arranged for the Olympic cauldron to be lit by a flaming arrow loosed from the bow of renowned Spanish Paralympic archer Antonio Rebello Liñán.

Personally, I was tense. I strongly didn’t wish for anything to go wrong. I actually resented why the whole thing had to be made so convolutedly difficult, in fact. What was wrong with the old idea of applying a flame directly? He could have done it with his flaming arrow as far as I was concerned.

Anyway. It worked perfectly. And it was only some time afterwards that I discovered that, while this was indeed a feat, it had been aided by the fact that there was a wide target area of streaming gas at which to aim.

I could have done with knowing that at the time.

Eight years later in Sydney, Olympic organisers, perhaps taken with Barcelona’s idea, went even bigger on flames in their Opening Ceremony. At one point poster girl Cathy Freeman appeared in imminent danger of immolation, which would have spoiled her chances of winning the women’s 400 metres gold.

Standing in a pool of shallow water, Freeman leant down to place the end of her torch around the surface, igniting a surrounding ring of fire. For a while, in fact for what seemed like a long, perilous, worrying while, she just stood there as the flames rose around her. Like Joan of Arc.

Imagine the panic. Imagine the thumping pulses and shaking hands as someone, somewhere, somehow, got the mechanism to work and the inner circle on which the beloved athlete stood finally slid downwards and away from what was by now a flying saucer of flame.

You don’t see that bit in the recordings - but the relieved smile on Freeman’s face as it slips to the safety below offers an enduring clue…

I trust no flames will be involved in the Birmingham 2022 Opening Ceremony. And that, if anything does go wrong, everybody will keep their collective wig on.

Prince Imran and Chris Hoy struggle with the baton during the

Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games. Photo: Getty Images