As the closing ceremony bought the curtain down on 11 days of Commonwealth Games sport at Gold Coast, there were plenty of memories of sporting highlights. And also, a few things that organiser, broadcasters and athletes might rather forget. Here are a few of the things that didn’t go quite so well in Australia...
A zero in the diving
New Zealand’s Elizabeth Cui made a splash of the wrong kind in the women’s 1m springboard preliminary round. The five-time national champion got her dive completely wrong, and ended up flopping into the pool on her back, earning her a mark of zero from every judge.
But Cui wasn’t the only person to have number trouble during the diving - the judges themselves fell victim to a glitch on the Games’ technical systems, and started the tournament having to mark divers using the back-up system of holding up number cards.
The athletes who didn’t make it to the Games
One athlete who got excluded from the Games through no fault of her own was English cyclist Melissa Lowther. She was all set to compete in the cycling time trial, but an unticked box on an administrative form meant the authorities excluded her from the start list. Lowther posted on Instagram to express her intense disappointment.
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Making a splash
There was an early bath for BBC Breakfast presenter Mike Bushell, who contrived to miss a step and fall into a swimming pool while live on air interviewing England Commonwealth Games swimmers Sarah Vasey, Adam Peaty, Siobhan-Marie O’Connor, Ben Proud and James Guy.
Athletes looking for love
A regular trope of Olympic Games coverage is about the number of condoms given away for free in the athlete’s village in the expectation that there will be a lot of hook-ups. And there were some red faces among athletes at the Games after some of their postings on Tinder were exposed.
Athletes like South African hockey player Nqobile Ntuli were spotted on the dating app, looking “to meet some wild troopers while I am down here”, while Australian swimmer Taylor Mckeown was spotted on the site posing with her silver medal from the 2016 Rio Olympics.
The gold medal that wasn’t
Zharnel Hughes found out on his lap of honour that he had been disqualified from the 200m final for impeding Trinidad’s Jereem Richards on the line. He redeemed himself by being part of England’s gold-medal winning 4x100m relay team, but will always look back on what might have been double gold on the Gold Coast track.
The medical team at the finish of the men’s marathon
Organisers were severely criticised after Scotland’s Callum Hawkins collapsed in the closing stages of the men’s marathon on Sunday. Leading by two minutes with less than two miles to go, Hawkins stumbled and appeared to hit his head on the kerbside as he fell.
Mark Peters, Gold Coast 2018 chief executive said that assistance had been provided “within agreed response guidelines and timeframes” and expressed concern about bystanders taking photos of the prone athlete rather than assisting. The BBC’s Steve Cram described the delay in medics reaching Hawkins as “disgraceful”.
Mixed success for the opening and closing ceremonies
After months of publicity building the Gold Coast up as a wonderful destination for sun, sea and surfing, the worldwide TV audience for the Games’ opening ceremony watched the heavens open and soak the dignitaries and performers as well as the athletes taking part in the opening parade. There was also a nationwide debate in Australia as to what had happened to Borobi - the blue koala mascot - who didn’t appear to feature at all during the opening ceremony, to the extent that organisers had to make a statement about his whereabouts, the hasthag #whereisborobi began, and somebody even set up a parody account to answer them all on Twitter.
Nope. Unfortunately I wasn't invited to take part in the Opening Ceremony 😢 #wheresborobi https://t.co/7UJWcceADS
— Real Borobi (@RealBorobi) April 4, 2018
Organisers had to apologise for printing 15,000 tickets for the opening ceremony with the wrong date on them - and that wasn’t even the only printing error. The late entrance of the Gambia back into the Commonwealth fold left programme-printers embarrassed as the official merchandise for the opening ceremony declared the English capital to be Banjul.
At least the opening ceremony was broadly well received, in contrast to the closing ceremony. Athletes had very little role to play in the latter, leading to Australia’s Channel 7 anchors Jo Griggs and Basil Zempilas controversially criticising it on air. “They made decisions not to have athletes enter the stadium” Griggs said. “They made the decision not to show the flag bearers. I’m furious. You want to see the athletes come in. You want to see them jumping in front of camera. You want to see them celebrating 11 days of great sport.”
Definitely an event to remember on Norfolk Island
There’s nothing like punching above your weight in sport, and that was true more than ever at this year’s Commonwealth Games for Norfolk Island. They sent a team of 18 athletes from their population of 1,748, meaning that one in every hundred Norfolk Islanders was part of their contingent. Ryan Dixon, Hadyn Evans and Phillip Jones went on to win the bronze in the lawn bowls for the third smallest territory to compete at the Gold Coast. Of teams at the Games, only Gibraltar and Nauru Island are physically smaller than Norfolk Island, and only Niue has a smaller population.
