Paul Weston: The report card rating the Games must see the city’s green and gold
REPORT cards on the Commonwealth Games economic benefits will soon be written. But will they consider the immeasurable?
Opinion
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REPORT cards will be written soon about the Commonwealth Games. On social media, people posting see it either as success or failure. But we need to consider the immeasurable.
We need to see the goodwill this event will bring the Gold Coast.
Join me on brief walk around the Glitter Strip.
We will be confronted by small business owners. They estimate losing at least $500 a day. Staff are being sent home, food tossed out.
“We would have had better trade if a cyclone hit us. They closed us down two weeks before the Games. We lost 70 per cent over Easter,” a leading Broadbeach restaurateur says.
They blame GOLDOC chair Peter Beattie and Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk for the M1 transport plan, the media for publicising it and Mayor Tom Tate after he suggested they lift their game and “have a good crack at it”.
The business operators make sense. Why close the roads so early? Why not bus up the Tweed kids who were still in school and let them see the free events at Currumbin?
At Southport in Chinatown there is a street party that few seem to know about. Why did the tram stop on the corner lack signage for the event when fans arrive back from the pool?
Festival 2018 in both Surfers Paradise and Broadbeach is hosting great acts (see our video) and deserves bigger audiences.
The winning is at the venues, mostly full inside where the crowds are loving the sporting action as athletes become stars and reach for their dreams.
But outside on the pavement, there is hostility and disappointment from some business owners staring at empty tables slowly filling, picking up speed like the 5000m race.
Pacific Parade at Currumbin, which hosted the race walk, Tuesday’s road cycling trials and tomorrow’s final race, has witnessed the worst of it with the foreshore street closed off.
Just north of the shopping strip, two GOLDOC staffers are using coloured chalk on the bitumen to draw attention to a small section of fencing cleared of banners.
A sign shows this is a viewing area for disabled and older people. As the cyclists pass, the young women in bright uniforms are waiting for two female residents.
One is aged 80, the other 97. By removing the signage, they can sit down and watch the race through the fencing.
“I never thought I’d live to see this,” the older woman tells them, tears in her eyes.
Some real care has been put into the planning here. The workers are loving their jobs.
The old and very young are more in number at this sporting event. They have embraced it.
They are not in hospitality suites or cashed-up but they will have a good story to tell about the Coast.
Some athletes from Dehli arrive, appear blinded by the morning light cast across the waves, reaching the white sand, the pandanus trees and finally the bitumen where they will race.
“This place is so green, so green. It’s just so blue. The beach is so clean. It’s almost too much,” an Indian race walker tells a GOLDOC staffer.
These pictures are being broadcast across the world. Australia’s young Jemima Montag in the race walk draws inspiration from the ocean to win.
Something quite beautiful happened here. You can see it, can’t you?
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