The Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games: An Introduction

On 4 April 2018, some 35,000 people jammed into Carrara Stadium on Queensland’s Gold Coast to see athletes from seventy-one nations march in to the Opening Ceremony of the 21st Commonwealth Games. It was a beautiful Gold Coast day and signalled the start to eleven days of competition across venues from Cairns in the north of Queensland to Coolangatta on the southern border with New South Wales. It was also the culmination of a ten-year journey that had started back in 2008 when Premier Anna Bligh mooted the suggestion of bringing the Games to the Gold Coast as a means of reviving and transforming a Gold Coast economy that had been badly affected by the Global Financial Crisis. Ten years later, more than 1.2 million spectators filled stadia and other venues as Queenslanders and visitors from interstate and overseas rode trains and buses to see colourful competitions in eighteen different sports and twenty-six different disciplines. In addition, many thousands of hours of television coverage reached a global audience estimated to be 1.5 billion. As a sporting spectacle, the Gold Coast Games were an undoubted success with several world records broken and a large number of Commonwealth records shattered. And notwithstanding understandable complaints about transport difficulties following the Opening Ceremony, the Games went off pretty much without a hitch. There were no major incidents or accidents, athletes were very happy and spectators went home satisfied with seeing spectacular events in excellent conditions. It was the second time the Commonwealth Games had come to Queensland, the first being in Brisbane back in 1982, and the fifth time in Australia – which has always hosted successful Games. Indeed, it had only been twelve years since the Games were last in Australia, hosted by Melbourne. However, this time the Games were hosted by a much smaller regional city in Australia, and they came to the Gold Coast not long after the problematic experience of the Delhi Games in 2010, when many leading athletes decided not to compete and venues were barely finished when competition was about to start. While the success of the Glasgow Games in 2014 certainly contributed significantly to recovering the reputation and image of the Commonwealth Games, according to its inaugural chairman Mark Stockwell, the Gold Coast Games had ‘a bit more riding on its success than has previously been the case : : : as much for the Commonwealth Games [movement] as for the Gold