No doubt about it. There was nothing common at all about the much-anticipated Commonwealth Games, or its media coverage, hosted by India over the past couple of weeks.
Images and stories wired around the globe by every possible news source prior to the opening ceremonies: a collapsed footbridge causing serious injury to dozens, poor sanitation standards in some quarters of the athletes’ village, a handful of athletes withdrawing from competition.
The global gasp was almost audible.
The world held its collective breath to see how India’s showpiece to the world would fare amidst allegations of corruption, ballooning costs, mismanagement, maltreatment of the poor, potential large and small scale security threats and shoddy workmanship. The media held everything under a microscope for international judgment and condemnation. And rightly so. And it was not just India’s bourgeoning reputation as a global player that was on the line. People of Indian extraction everywhere suffered a tarnishing of national pride, an embarrassment that the Indian government and Delhi Organizing Committee exposed India’s shortcomings in such a grand and public manner.
It seemed that nothing short of a miracle would be needed for India to pull this off successfully. By all accounts, this was India’s own Mt. Everest to climb.
And then the nearly unthinkable happened … nothing. Nothing out of the ordinary, that is.
Oh sure, there were reports of Delhi-belly causing some athletes to suffer, problems with some weighing scales and initial poor attendance at some venues. But what games haven’t suffered some - what I would call - minor issues to cope with? Or for that matter, even major ones? The Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, for one, suffered a terrific blow at the outset of the Games with the tragic death of an athlete during a practice run on the luge track. Not from lack of planning, admittedly, but bad things can - and do - happen.
In India’s case, not only were there systemic challenges such as widespread corruption (hey, take India as you find it; this is a well-documented fact commonly known from well before the Games were awarded to Delhi), but it also faced real plausible security threats from both within and outside its borders from multiple and unrelated violent-leaning factions. Think Toronto’s G20 security concerns and then multiply them … many times over. And this was just one of the many challenges of hosting the Games in India.
So when you consider the record-breaking number of athletes in attendance, the spectacular showmanship of the opening and closing ceremonies, the lauded venues hosting the competitions and the tight security that safeguarded India’s guests from around the world, one could – and should - rightly sum up the Delhi Games as a sound success.
On the eve of Closing Ceremonies of the Games, I settled in to watch my favourite news program, The National on CBC, looking forward to hearing a positive wrap-up of the Games, after all the initial (deserved) negative coverage. Would you believe … there was absolutely no report on the end of the Games!?! Nothing. Unless you count a passing comment made by Peter Mansbridge to Canada’s Most Watched Political Panel. This despite the fact that the CBC was the official broadcaster of the Games in Canada.
Was the success of the Games not newsworthy? Is it not the responsibility of the media to ensure that a fair and balanced representation of facts is presented to the viewing public? This is not to say that in basking in the glory of success, India should not learn some valuable and indeed crucial lessons. One would hope that the glare of the international spotlight would encourage India to focus on some of the deficiencies that nearly decimated the very gains it hoped to achieve by hosting the Games. But it does sometimes seem that the story becomes what the media decides it is, and objective reporting is lost. From the outset, India’s failures were the subject of a feeding frenzy … the prospect of spectacular failure is sexy news after all. The National dispatched international correspondent Adrienne Arsenault to Delhi to provide detailed coverage, and her reports never quite lost their tone of criticism or censure. Much how the media coverage ensured that what is predominantly remembered about the Athens and Montreal Olympics are the problematic facilities and cost overruns, instead of the inspiring success of the respective Games or the first perfect 10 scored by Nadia Comaneci.
In the end and despite all dire predictions, Delhi delivered the Games to the world.
And to me, that is (equally deserved) good news indeed.
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