Asian Games and Commonwealth Games: Hosts, Mascots and MCQs

After the Olympic Games, the two multi-sport meets that competitive examinations ask about most are the Asian Games and the Commonwealth Games. Both are held once in four years, both have an Indian edition in their history, and both come with a small set of fixed facts, the first year, the founding city, the governing body, the motto and the mascot, which are simply asked back in one line. Learning the two together is efficient, because papers often place a fact from one of them among the options of a question about the other.

The Asian Games: how they began

The idea of a games for Asia belongs to Guru Dutt Sondhi of India, who proposed it while the Asian countries were competing at the 1948 London Olympics. The Asian Games Federation was formed in New Delhi in 1949, and the first Asian Games were held in New Delhi in March 1951, with eleven nations taking part and Jawaharlal Nehru declaring them open at the National Stadium. The motto given to the Games, Ever Onward, and the emblem of a bright rising sun with interlocking rings, both date from that first edition. India finished second in the medal table of 1951, behind Japan, which topped it.

In 1982 the Asian Games Federation was replaced by the Olympic Council of Asia, whose headquarters are in Kuwait City, and the first Games under the new body were again held in New Delhi, in 1982. That edition gave Indian sport its best-remembered mascot, Appu the elephant, and was the first Asian Games that Indian television carried in colour. India has therefore hosted the Asiad twice, in 1951 and 1982, both times in Delhi. Bangkok has hosted it more often than any other city.

Asian Games: the host cities worth remembering

The Commonwealth Games: from Empire to friendship

A festival of the nations of the British Empire was first proposed by John Astley Cooper in 1891, but the meet took shape only when Melville Marks Robinson organised the first British Empire Games at Hamilton in Canada in 1930. The name changed with the politics of the Commonwealth: British Empire Games until 1950, British Empire and Commonwealth Games from 1954, British Commonwealth Games from 1970, and simply the Commonwealth Games from the 1978 edition onwards. The Games are run by the Commonwealth Games Federation, whose motto is Humanity, Equality, Destiny, and they are widely called the Friendly Games. The Baton Relay, which carries a message from the Head of the Commonwealth to the opening ceremony, began at the 1958 Cardiff Games and is the counterpart of the Olympic torch relay.

India took part for the first time at the second edition, held in London in 1934, and Rashid Anwar won a bronze in wrestling, the country's first Commonwealth Games medal. At Cardiff in 1958 Milkha Singh won the 440 yards, India's first athletics gold at these Games and still the most quoted Indian performance in them. India hosted the Games once, the nineteenth Commonwealth Games at Delhi in 2010, whose mascot was Shera the tiger and whose slogan was Come Out and Play. The programme of the Commonwealth Games is distinctive because it carries sports that the Olympics do not, such as lawn bowls, netball and squash, while shooting, wrestling, weightlifting and badminton are the events in which Indian athletes have traditionally done well.

The two Games side by side

How to revise this chapter

Fix five numbers and five names and the chapter is done. The numbers are 1949 for the founding of the Asian Games Federation, 1951 for the first Asiad, 1982 for both the Olympic Council of Asia and the second Delhi Asiad, 1930 for the first British Empire Games and 2010 for the Delhi Commonwealth Games. The names are Guru Dutt Sondhi, Appu, Shera, Milkha Singh and the two mottoes. Avoid memorising medal tallies of recent editions, because those are exactly the facts that change and that examiners take from the paper of the year in which the question was set.