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Commonwealth leaders back strategy for rescuing Games
HARARE: Commonwealth leaders have
given their backing to a six-part strategy for
promoting sport and rescuing the loss-mak
ing Commonwealth Games.
Debating sport on the final day of the
Commonwealth Heads of Government
Meeting in Harare, the leaders approved a
report released in July by Canadian judge
Roy McMurty and his 11-man team.
That report warned that the very survival
of the Commonwealth Games, held every
four years for the past 60 years, was in
jeopardy.
At the last Commonwealth Games in
Auckland last year, 70 percent of the 2073
athletes came from the big four among the
50 nations — Britain, Australia. Canada
and New Zealand. They walked off with 86
percent of the medals.
"The developing Commonwealth is dras
tically under-represented in both participa
tion and medal performances," the report
stressed. Should these countries lose interest
in the Games, we doubt the Games would
survive.
"And without the Games, the Common
wealth would have lost the most potent
public symbol of its unity."
But so far the only pledge of funding for
the proposals in the report has come from
Papua New Guinea.
The report stressed the importance of
sport for a healthy society.
It said the "most critical and pressing
issue" was the disparity in sports funding in
the developed and developing Common
wealth countries.
The average Canadian high school had
"more resources for sport... than a number
of countries in the Commonwealth," it
points out.
The six-part strategy calls for
Government commitment to sustain the
Games;
Seed funding to put the Games on a sound
financial footing;
Evolution of the Games to reflect the make
up of the modern Commonwealth;
Sharing of resources;
Commitment by developing countries to
invest in sport;
The creation of an ad-hoc permanent com
mittee on Commonwealth sports cooper
ation.
— AFP
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