The 2010 commonwealth games have been cancelled. With less than two weeks to go, the plug has been pulled by the organizers. Whether they realize it or not.
The BBC reported that 50,000 from over 2 million ticket sales have been sold, and a picture has been painted of horrific conditions in the Delhi destination.
The first fact alone would imply that the event has been cancelled, without the reports that some British athletes have pulled out and that more athletes have quit . They’ll be saying the Queen can’t make it next, as she forgot a hair appointment.
The understatement that there is a long way to go before the first athletes arrive on Friday (yes that’s two days from now) shows to me that the organizers or at least their PR team have been sniffing glue, rather than gluing bridges.
If you take away the stars, tell people that security is whack and then tell people no-one is watching, you’ve got a catastrophe on your hands. If you don’t cancel it yourselves, it will be cancelled all around you.
Just as the British Commonwealth was built on the backs of the bruised and has since crumbled and been re-badged, you can’t build an Olympic-esque village with unsafe conditions that injure the construction crews. That would fly in the face of the shared values of the Commonwealth of Nations : human rights.
Without values, the non-political Commonwealth is what? An excuse for a big party in India?