Victoria, Australia, to dump the 2026 Commonwealth Games

We need a developmental championships. Something for emerging athletes that aren't quite at world finals standard.

Europeans have their championships, which is great for second tier athletes and for fostering depth.

Athletics in Australia will suffer without a stepping stone between national championships and worlds/Olympics.

Terribly disappointing. Hope that it can still happen but not too optimistic.

"Commonwealth" is that even a thing anymore?

For something like that to be viable we'd need to integrate with another region because Oceania is just too small. The Comm Games were a pretty good substitute for a continental meet like European Games/Championships.

Might as well do the Euros given that you do the Eurovision Song Contest...

Sustainability should be judged by a 3rd party commission. The most important criteria is the venues, housing, and training facilities has to have been used in the past for decades and will be used year-around by established sports leagues, colleges, and youths.

Oh, no, my dear. "Criteria" is a plural noun. One should say either "criteria are" or "criterion is."

Well, lets hope that Australia never win the Eurovision Song Contest, based on their drop out rate for hosting championships.

Bit of a failure by the Australian state of Victoria and a tragedy for Australian athletes, given they have so far to travel to gain international competition and it can be hard for them to find funding to help them do so in the early years.

It would be interesting to hear whether this is bad management. Their costs for the Games were huge compared to Manchester and this seemed due to wanting to spread it out over different cities and building infrastructure in each. I wouldn't assume that management in Oz was good, their triathlon federation has been in crisis for several years now due to pretty terrible management and a lot of the budget being wasted by the CEO. Their triathletes have gone from being top of the pile internationally to also rans and many have given up on Olympic level sport as a result.

It would also be nice to see other countries step up to the plate in hosting championships that they benefit from. Kenya - I'm thinking of you. And Australia should be hosting their fair share. Manchester relied heavily on a large number of volunteers to come in on budget, giving up their time for free and often using their annual leave to do so.

Big part of the trouble is that it isn't just a track meet. It has 18-20 'sports' including things like netball and squash and shooting that no one goes to watch.

Commonwealth Games are a celebration of Colonialism that should have stayed in the 20th Century. Hopefully this is the final chapter.

i don't understand why it costs that much. assume we are using AUD so 7 billion AUD is roughly 3 billion GBP, yet birmingham did it 4 years ago for £800 million.

use existing venues, don't build anything new. make the visiting athletes pay for all their travel and accommodation and food, if they don't already do that. scrap the opening and closing ceremonies or just send up a few fireworks and get the local brass band in for the night.

then all you have to pay is staffing and equipment costs. and surely you make decent money from sponsorships and advertising boards to offset some of the costs. not to mention ticket sales. it should be profitable, not a loss maker.

the problem is you have national and local government funding and organising everything. if you had a private company doing it, they'd make sure they kept costs down. the public sector knows the value of nothing because it isn't their money they're squandering.

Maybe if they made the games much smaller,with less sports,they would be cheaper.Just stick to track and field,cycling,weightlifting,swimming and a few other individual sports.It never used to have team sports.Get rid of those,plus shooting,lawn bowls and whatever else hardly anyone watches.

but even with the team sports, let's say hockey. small venue, not many spectators; hundreds rather than thousands. you might have a dozen security guards, a referee team of 3 people and maybe 10-20 other staff sorting out all the media, ticketing, announcements etc. you'd have them in the same venue for the full day and you could get 3 or 4 matches done. surely the ticket sales would cover the staff costs in that scenario? i think only the referees might need to be flown in because there'd be some rule about having neutral referees.

probably most of the money is going on upgrading venues like replacing or painting thousands of old seats and it's a waste of time and money. it might not look quite as glitzy for TV but don't worry so much about keeping up appearances, focus on the sporting action.

You are about 75% right. The big problem is the funding is public money. Whether is is an NGO or a private company spending that money is less of an issue. The problem is that as soon as public money is being spent all sorts of cockroaches come out of the woodwork to try to get their claws on as much as they can.

Usually these people have access to politicians to help explain why their contract for name tags at $250 a pop is extremely good value. If the NGO or private company push back they may get black balled by the government and they certainly don't want that. Better to just rack it up as another "change in requirements - high security name tags" and get the lawyers to negotiate another chunk of public money.

I worked in Aerospace and our company had several defence related contracts. When you see they type of scum these contracts attract you would feel the hookers who line up on Main Street after dark are paragons of virtue.

Nobody believes that mindless sh*t anymore.

When a city takes on something like this they contract out most everything to private companies and nonprofits. As soon as a private company gets a contract it's scheming to get even more money and to reduce costs from subcontractors. When there's a cost overrun the extra costs go right into private company pockets.

thats how theyre sort of doing it with fifa in a few years. Give it to US/Mexico/Canada(i think?) and have them spread out the fixtures over the numerous venues across those countries. If i remember correctly that is how fifa does it most of the time really, spread it out. Ik Brazil in 2014 had to build more stadiums around the country too

not sure what 'nonprofits' have to do with it, do you just mean volunteers?

and this is what i mean. they contract a private company, you said it yourself. so money is paid to the contractor by the government, it will almost always be a bad deal for the taxpayer. have the private company run the whole thing from the start without government involvement, they will make it profitable because if they don't there is nobody to bail them out and they have shareholders to answer to.