The 2022 Commonwealth Games will begin in Birmingham on Thursday, but for a long time they didn’t have an interested bidder at all. The Commonwealth Games Federation (CGF) called an emergency meeting two months before the application deadline in March 2014 as it searched for a viable host willing to foot the bill. Eventually the Canadian city of Edmonton and the South African city of Durban came forward with last-minute proposals, and when Edmonton later withdrew over a lack of funding, Durban was anointed.
Nearly a century after Johannesburg had lost the right to host for refusing to accept non-white athletes, the possibility of finally seeing a Commonwealth Games in Africa was a potential PR coup, but Durban’s financial plan didn’t add up and it was stripped of the Games after a double-check of the accounts. So, in 2017 in the wake of the Brexit referendum, the British government spotted an opportunity for some good cheer and flag-waving, and decided the £800m cost was worth paying.
