Up Front

with the Editor

This issue of PIM, and the next, are spilling over with sporting news, and of course the reason for it is the Third South Pacific Games, just about to erupt in Port Moresby. For every reader who thinks we have overdone it, there’ll be another three who would want us to do still more.

Sport is big news in the South Pacific every month of every year.

Sport, not politics, has done most to unify the Islands. The territories talk the same sports language—if one allows for the French passion for bicycle racing and the British fanaticism for hitting golf balls.

It is the South Pacific Games series, begun only six years ago, that has made this common interest obvious and thus given the South Pacific a new dimension of unity.

I reported that first South Pacific Games for PIM. Suva, that week in August, 1963, was all things to all of the South Seas, as nearly 700 sportsmen from 13 territories came together. Not even the regular South Pacific Conferences had brought so many Pacific peoples to the one spot at the one time.

Sophisticated

The impact was much greater on the visitors than on the people of Suva. Suva’s reaction to this, the biggest single gathering of repre sentative South Pacific people yet assembled, was one of those un expected ones that are part of Suva’s special charm. There was a carnival atmosphere, yet no Games “fever”.

All of us had predicted that Suva would collapse in chaos under the impact, but Suva coped without panic —treating it as a sort of sustained week of paydays, a whole week of cruise ships in port.

From Popondetta to Malaita and the backblocks of Tahiti, none of the visitors had suspected there could be such a sophisticated South Seas city as Suva, and their activities in the sports arena turned out to be of less importance to them than the whole new social world that was opened up.

This was really living.

Socially, Noumea wasn’t quite the same success, but this I think was

due to the subtle changes in the South Pacific sporting atmosphere which followed Suva.

Nobody knew before Suva what the sporting yardstick was. After Suva, they knew. More importantly, they could see how the new yardstick could be met.

Fiji showed the South Pacific that sporting organisation was required; that there had to be playing fields to train on, pools to practise in, and serious, specialised coaching. It was not good enough to play competitive sport with nothing but enthusiasm and natural aptitude.

Fiji in 1963 had been better or ganised than any other territory— it played more sport, more kinds of sport and had more grounds to play on than anybody else. It was Fiji which had originally suggested that the Games be launched. It was no surprise that Fiji dominated the first Games.

The pages of PIM in the three years after Suva disclosed, month by month, how the slapdash sporting approach was being abandoned by the territories. Nobody learned the lessons of Suva better than the French, who were determined to make a good showing on their home ground in 1966. They built grounds, a splendid pool, brought out coaches and sent their leading athletes and swimmers abroad to gain experience.

They deserved their walkaway win at Noumea, because other territories had not been idle either, and now knew the score.

Standards and determination have improved still further in the three years since Noumea. I have no doubt they will continue to improve, but in the meantime there has been another development.

This is the problem of distance and finance, which are related. It has now become apparent that all

the territories—most with economic problems—can’t raise money enough to get their people to the Games.

Niue, the Gilbert & Ellice Islands, and at the last-minute the Cook Islands, have all withdrawn because of the cash shortage. Some are talk ing of staying out and spending the money on improving sports facilities locally. Other territories have severely reduced team sizes, which will have the effect of depriving younger athletes of experience. Worse than that, if this trend continues, the social aspects of the Games—the impact of one South Pacific group on another—will be destroyed. The day could come when we send only small, highly trained athletes to the South Pacific Games for no purpose but to win at all costs.

That was not the intention of those who at a meeting of the South Pacific Conference in 1959 proposed that an inter-territory tournament be established “to overcome in sularity in the South Pacific”.

How do you fix it?

What to do about it?

My old friend Fred Dunn, who was at that time PlM’s correspondent in New Caledonia, suggested in PIM just after the Noumea Games that territories think about the advantages of holding every Games in Noumea.

This, he said, would avoid athletes making the long and expensive drag from, say, Tahiti to Port Moresby; and save less-favoured territories from having to pay out huge sums on sporting facilities to host the Games in their turn.

“It might even be possible,” wrote Fred Dunn, “to work out a system whereby other countries host the Games using New Caledonia’s facilities.”

Certainly the idea of a more central Games arena—possibly Suva —has a lot going for it. It is worth discussing seriously in the next few weeks, when the organisers must decide whether to accept France’s offer to stage the 1972 Games in

Papeete.

Stuart Inder