: A global sporting spectacle spawned by a Letter to the Editor (IANS Backgrounder) #IndiaNEWS #Sports,Other Sports By Sourish BhattacharyaNew Delhi, July 23 (IANS) It was a Letter to the Editor of

A global sporting spectacle spawned by a Letter to the Editor (IANS Backgrounder) #IndiaNEWS #Sports ,Other Sports
By Sourish BhattacharyaNew Delhi, July 23 (IANS) It was a Letter to the Editor of The Times of London in 1891 by John Astley Cooper, described by his contemporaries as a propagandist for athleticism, in 1891 that planted the seed of the idea that became the Commonwealth Games, the biggest multi-sport spectacle today after the Olympics.
Cooper made a robust case for a Pan-Britannic-Pan-Anglican Contest and Festival every four years as a means of increasing goodwill and good understanding of the British Empire. But it was Baron Pierre de Coubertin who first acted on the idea and after of course modifying it, launched the Olympic Movement.
The original idea, which found a distant promoter in Richard Coombes in Australia (Cooper was born in Adelaide before his family moved to England), was brought to life as the Inter-Empire Championship in 1911 to coincide with the coronation of King George V, which Indians will remember for the Durbar that was held at the Red Fort in Delhi, which was attended by the British monarch and his wife. It was at this Durbar that the king announced the shifting of the capital of British India from Calcutta to New Delhi.
The Inter-Empire Championship was a grievous disappointment, as a journalist from the Auckland Star wrote, with teams from the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and South Africa participating in a limited number of events. Then came the tumultuous World War I, and by the time the world recovered from it, Coopers idea was consigned to historys footnotes.
But then came Melville Marks Bobby Robinson, the sports editor of the Canadian newspaper, The Hamilton Spectator, who went to the 1928 Summer Olympics in Amsterdam as manager of his countrys track and field team.
At the Olympics, riled by the behaviour of the Americans and the Germans, who obviously did better far than athletes from the British Empire, Robinson lobbied for a British Empire Games to be launched in his home city in 1930.
When his idea got the green light, Cooper claimed much of the credit and said that his aim had been to show through a festival of sport and culture that Anglo-Saxons ruled the world. Unfortunately, he died six months before the first British Empire Games were flagged off on August 16, 1930, in Hamilton, Ontario, by the then Governor-General of Canada, Lord Willingdon, who later served as the Viceroy of British India between 1931 and 1936.
Ironically, far removed Coopers vision, in the 2022 Commonwealth Games, the overwhelming majority of the 72 participating nations are not Anglo-Saxon; the city in which they are being held, Birmingham, has Britains highest population of people of Indian origin; and the host country, England, is in the middle of a contest for the Prime Ministers office where one of the two contenders is of British African Indian origin, a devout Hindu, and is married to the daughter of one of the pioneers of Indias infotech success story.

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