ABSTRACT
In July 2002, athletes from 71 countries assembled in Manchester in northwest England to attend the seventeenth Commonwealth Games. Although less prestigious than premier sporting festivals like the Olympics or football’s World Cup, the Commonwealth Games are still events of some pedigree. The current series was inaugurated as the British Empire Games at Hamilton (Ontario, Canada) in 1930 and, apart from the break caused by the Second World War, has been held at four-yearly intervals ever since. The Empire Games were themselves effectively heirs to the sporting competitions that started at the Festival of the Empire in London (1911). Those, in turn, traced their origins back to 1891 when John Astley Cooper, an Australian living in London, proposed the establishment of a periodic Pan-Britannic festival to celebrate the industrial, cultural and athletic prowess of the AngloSaxon race (Moore, 1991; see also Chapter 6).
