The Commonwealth Games ought to be prefaced with one of those warnings about outdated attitudes, like the kind Disney have attached to the beginning of its old movies. They could run it before the opening ceremony, right before they bring on Simon Le Bon. “These Games were predicated on the mistreatment of people and cultures.”
The first were held in Hamilton in 1930, but have roots that go back beyond that into the Victorian era. In the official timeline, it was an Anglican clergyman called J Astley Cooper who first floated the idea for a “pan-Britannic festival of culture and sport” in a series of public letters published in 1891.
