First South Seas

"Olympics" Went

Off With A Bang

From Stuart Inder, in Suva

No other South Pacific locale but the City of Suva could have supplied the First South Pacific Games—from August 29 to September 7—with such a mixture of sophistication and balmy Pacific breezes; of hard-headed organisation and colonial pageantry; of blase commercialism and the scent of coconut oil on glistening bodies.

SUVA was all things to all of the South Seas during the week, as nearly 700 sportsmen from 13 terri tories met for the first time at their own “Olympics”.

The impact was much greater on the visitors than on Suva people, for Suva’s reactions to the biggest single gathering of representative South Seas people ever assembled was one of those unexpected ones that are part of Suva’s special charm.

There was a carnival atmosphere in Suva, but no Games “fever”. The high-pitched enthusiasm and national identification that anticipates a Royal visit or the return of a battalion from Malaya were missing.

It was rather like a whole week of pay-days; a whole week of new cruise ships in port—all of which Suva can take in its stride, even if a little more out of breath and a little more pie-eyed than usual.

Perhaps Suva is getting older.

It certainly got busier in the busi ness sector during Games Week.

Shops made frantic sales of radios and cameras at duty free prices (the competitors were big spenders).

The taxis and Indian buses filled Jie city with exhaust smoke (as their irivers complained of the traffic and ack of police on point duty).

The cafes were jammed from areakfast to midnight with com petitors demanding steaks and fried :ice (some complained they didn’t get mough to eat in the villages).

The bars were twice as rowdy and wice as beer-stained, with matelots :rom the French frigate Commandant Riviere trying to out-shout and cut ting the tars from HMS Cook.

Meanwhile, every transistor in Suva boomed out sporting com mentaries and blatantly partisan

messages from the teams to the folk back home.

The visitors were part of all this and it was they who were wide-eyed at the sophistication of it all.

From Popondetta to Malaita and the backblocks of Tahiti, from Moresby and Noumea to Apia, nobody suspected, apparently, that there was a place in the South Seas quite like Suva, and the fact that the city people could take the in vasion in their stride was all the more impressive.

The activities in the sports arena were a separate world—for some a vital world where results counted; but for others just a minor part of the whole adventure.

Mixed Quality

The quality of sporting prowess was mixed—from woeful to un expectedly good, but with no world shattering times.

From the sporting and social view points the South Pacific Games were an undoubted success.

Yet a few days before the Games opened there was apprehension in many quarters. Months of detailed work were supposed to be bearing fruit, yet nothing was ready.

In August, Suva had five times more rain than normal for the month and just before the Games started, the main venue at Buckhurst Park was under water, and there were grim jokes about turning the alter native ground at Albert Park into a swimming stadium.

A planned car park at Buckhurst Park still looked like a stretch of rice paddy.

As hundreds of competitors began to pour into Fiji aboard a wide variety of aircraft and seacraft, demanding to be bedded down in one of the three Games villages, the Games organisers reached a peak of irritability. It looked as if the whole thing was going to be bungled.

But opening day dawned bright.

Soon after 9 a.m. Mrs. Nono Tani, of the Cook Islands, whanged a tennis ball at her West Samoan opponent at Albert Park; Games Director of Organisation Joe Coyne mopped his brow in the sunshine and positively beamed for the first time in weeks; and the First South Pacific Games were under way.

The success of the following week proved that the late-August appre hensions were only last-minute jitters after all. • A detailed, 12-page Games Record will be found in this issue following page 74.

THE FIJI SCENE: Plenty of pictures like this were undoubtedly taken in Suva during the First South Pacific Games—but Rob Wright took this one when the liner "Orcades" visited Savusavu re cently. Rob Wright also took our cover picture this month, which shows Fiji's Governor, Sir Kenneth Maddocks, officially opening the Games at Buckhurst Park before a crowd of 8,000 people.