Australia has placed extra COVID safety measures of their own on athletes at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, including wearing masks and limits on athletes spectating and moving between events.
Australia’s chef de mission Petria Thomas said Australia had developed their own version of the COVID playbook recently released by games organisers.
The additional restrictions include such things as mask-wearing, similar to the Tokyo Olympics when athletes were required to wear masks at all times unless they were competing, walking outdoors, or alone in their rooms. Athletes also won’t be able to attend as spectators for other events.
Australians Jake Birtwhistle and Ashleigh Gentle change over during the triathlon mixed team relay at the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games in 2018. Credit:Getty Images
“We have overlaying, additional protocols that our team will follow to get our athletes to the starting line and [ensure] they are performance ready,” Thomas said.
Australia’s athletes will also be split between the five athletes’ villages around Birmingham – and a sixth in London for the track cycling team – and will therefore not be housed in the same location.
Birmingham organisers had to scrap plans for one athletes’ village, due to building delays forced by COVID. Still, with five Birmingham athletes’ villages the Australian team has been spread across all five, and not all housed in one.
“We still want to make sure we create an experience that, no matter what village you are in, you still feel part of the Australian team,” Thomas said.
“It’s going to be challenging to replicate what we would normally have in a single village, but our message is there is not much we can do about the multi-village arrangement, we have to live with it, and we want to try and maximise the environment we do have.”
Thomas said athletes were keenly aware of the significance of the Commonwealth Games as an event in its own right, but also as a springboard for careers.
“I think [with] the Commonwealth Games, you don’t have to provide too much direction for them – they know the importance of them and they know a lot of athletes in various sports have prioritised Commonwealth Games this year over other events, which is just fantastic,” she said.
Petria Thomas celebrates after winning a gold medal in the 100-meter butterfly at Athens Olympic Games.Credit:AP
“There is always talk about the relevance of the Commonwealth Games, but you only have to see the passion that the athletes compete with at a Commonwealth Games and see the looks on their face when they achieve what they set out to achieve to know how important it is to them.
“They get it, and they don’t need any additional motivating – they know it’s an important event and Australians value Commonwealth Games, and we have had great history and success in the games.”
Thomas, the former Olympic and Commonwealth gold medal-winning swimmer, said her gold in the 100m butterfly in Victoria, Canada in 1994 was career-changing and helped her understand how to win and go on to Olympic gold in Athens.
“It gave me the confidence to believe I was good enough to be on the world stage, and it taught me how to win,” she said.
Australia will send its biggest team ever to an overseas games, with 435 athletes including pilots and guides for some of the para athletes. Only the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games team was bigger.
Five Australian women will be competing at their fifth or sixth Commonwealth Games in Birmingham 2022.Credit:Getty Images/SMH
Despite scepticism of the relevance of, and interest in, the Commonwealth Games as a concept – with no city bidding to host the next games outright and Victoria being encouraged to host the games as a slightly pared back regional event – Birmingham is on target to have the biggest crowd ever at a Commonwealth Games.
British media reported 16 days out from the start of the games that 1.2 million tickets had been sold, which was equal to the total sales for the Gold Coast games and just 100,000 short of the attendance in Glasgow. It was expected that by the completion of the games that figure would be comfortably surpassed.
By comparison of scale, the London Olympics sold 11 million tickets.
The Commonwealth Games comprises athletes from 72 countries competing in 20 sports over 11 days. The Tokyo Olympics, in contrast, had 11,000 athletes from 206 countries competing in 302 events in 36 sports across 16 days.
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