MELBOURNE – India should not have been allowed to host the 2010 Commonwealth Games, according to Australian Olympic Committee (AOC) president John Coates.
Construction delays have hampered the preparations for the Games, which are scheduled to start on October 3, and the athletes’ village was last week called “uninhabitable”.
“In hindsight, no, they shouldn’t have been awarded the Games,” Coates said.
Coates was one of the leading members of the organising committee for the Sydney Olympics in 2000, and is also an elected member of the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) executive board.
He pointed out that part of the problem facing the Commonwealth Games Federation is that they only have five people overseeing Delhi’s progress. In contrast, the IOC, which is currently monitoring preparations for the 2012 Olympics in London, has 400 staff.
“The CGF is under-resourced,” he continued. “It doesn’t have the ability to monitor the progress of cities in the way the IOC does.”
Coates also said that the IOC has contracts in place with London and 2016 Olympic hosts Rio de Janiero to ensure construction deadlines are met and test events are carried out one year before the Games.
“If that had been the case here [in Delhi], then certainly something would have been done a lot sooner because obviously the venues are not ready,” he said.
“Certainly the Commonwealth Games for its future needs to move away from just the old countries – Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Britain taking turns. But the problem is, they [India] weren’t ready.” (BBC)
