Winston Aldworth: All eyes on Games and off bad build up

Irene Van Dyk. Photo / Getty Images

Sometime this afternoon, a bunch of swimmers will hit the water in Delhi - and the Commonwealth Games will be underway.

When the first competitors go into action, organisers will breathe a sigh of relief. The show starts when the men in the heats for the 50m backstroke (Kiwis Daniel Bell and Gareth Kean among them) dip their budgie-smuggled behinds into the pool, swinging the eyes of the sporting world from the building-site chaos of preparation to the cheerful exhilaration of competition.

Relief for Delhi will come when press coverage of the Games swings away from the shoddy preparation and on to the actual athletes actually competing and actually winning. Even actually failing drug tests would be considered a major step up in the good-news quotient for a Games thus far notorious for corruption, ineptitude and misplaced pooh.

In fact, a failed drug test would make villains of the cheating athlete and their home country, shifting the heat from Delhi's organisers and on to the nation of the drug cheat. All of which means, the Indian bosses might be sitting uncomfortably when their weightlifters are asked to pee in the jar.

India, that most famously surprising of places, has thrown the Commonwealth some mighty curve balls in the lead-up to the Delhi Games. The New Zealand team management choice of flagbearer was less surprising, but perhaps an opportunity was missed.

When Irene van Dyk competed in South African colours at the Kuala Lumpur Games back in 1998, she might have idly wondered if some day she would get the chance to carry her nation's flag at an opening ceremony. A decade-and-a-bit and a change of passports later, she got her chance.

Van Dyk's achievements in netball are the stuff of legend. Her talent, commitment and unquenched competitive fire are traits for young athletes to admire. But should she have carried the flag?

Our cousins across the Ditch named their netball captain Sharelle McMahon as their own flagbearer ahead of New Zealand's announcement. Swine.

The Jamaicans, ever chasing the netball pack, named their own skipper, Simone Forbes, as flagbearer.

You might reasonably wonder if this honour might better have gone to a competitor in one of the many sports that doesn't get the sort of publicity and media coverage back home that netball can take for granted.

Valerie Adams, Nick Willis and Moss Burmester weren't available.

But surely this was a chance to pay tribute to and elevate the profile of our cyclists, from whom such great things are expected in Delhi, and at London in 2012.

WEEKEND WINNER

Irene van Dyk

Netball's super shooter (left) becomes possibly the first New Zealand Games flag-bearer to say "Ja, it's awesome" when asked about the appointment.

WHAT TO WATCH

The Ryder Cup

There are plenty of things you can do in Wales in October. All of them involve being indoors and most of them involve pints of beer. So pitching the golfing world's biggest set-to at the mercy of the Welsh weather seems optimistic. Nonetheless, a sport that's largely unwatchable on the telly comes to life as Golf War between the US of A and the European Surrender-Monkeys. Fist-pumping good viewing, even for neutrals. Or, you could watch that thing in Delhi...