Common Interest (2018)

Commonwealth Games: medal table for Gold Coast 2018: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/ng-interactive/2018/apr/05/commonwealth-games-medal-table-for-gold-coast-2018

Looking at the results of the recent Commonwealth Games, I don’t know if I should be amazed, shocked, or outraged by the medal count. For example, Australia, a country of almost 25 million people, got three times more medals than India, a country of 1 billion, 300 million people. In other words, India, a country with a population 52 times bigger than Australia finished the Games with 132 fewer medals than Australia. One might conclude that the athletes from Australia are either born with superpowers, an impossible and racist conjecture or else there is a political will and economic policies to sustain and elevate levels of athletic prowess Down Under. The gap between winners and non-winners begins to look like a canyon with the seven nations of Australia, England, Canada, New Zealand, Wales Scotland, North Ireland and the Isle of Man winning a total of 565 medals. The other sixty-four participant nations took away 234 medals, that count includes the total medals won by the sum of participating African nations.

If the Commonwealth is the traditional English descriptor for a political community founded for the common good, I wonder what is the common wealth at play here. It is certainly not embodied in the haul of medals that are awarded to the best of the best. What we are seeing in competitions like the Commonwealth Games, even more so than in the Olympic Games, is a visualization of international inequalities.

When we talk about fair games, the usual common topic is anti-doping criteria. There are clean and not-so-clean participants, but chemical enhancements are not the only kinds of boosts that can propel your average sprinter. Wealth is a marker that could be used to identify the possible ability, success, and/or failure of a participant or nation. Perhaps the Gini index which looks at wealth distribution of a nation’s residents to measure inequalities could be tailored to test athletes, not for prohibited chemical enhancements, but to quantify economic advantage.

See also:
DEMOS / The Racial Wealth Gap: Why Policy Matters
http://www.demos.org/publication/racial-wealth-gap-why-policy-matters
Handicap (golf)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handicap_(golf)