Red Arrows and raging bulls – the Commonwealth Games opens in Birmingham

Red Arrows and raging bulls rumbled around Alexander Stadium on Thursday night as a Commonwealth Games that many claim faces a continuing fight to retain its relevance amped up the volume and belted a bold declaration of its intent to preserve its voice.

Against a Brummie musical backdrop ranging from Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi to eighties new wavers Duran Duran, the first Games to be staged in England since Manchester in 2002 arrived amid a deafening chorus of calls for change both on and off the track.

Nick Rhodes and John Taylor formed Duran Duran as the house band for the Rum Runner nightclub on Broad Street in 1978, the same year Edmonton in Alberta staged the 13th edition of the Games, controversially boycotted by Nigeria and Uganda over New Zealand’s continued sporting dialogue with apartheid-era South Africa.

Just like the creaking sexagenarians who brought the ceremony to a rousing close, the Commonwealth Games has had more than its fair share of hits and misses since; problems made all the more palpable since the Gold Coast in 2018 by the respective decisions of Barbados and Jamaica to remove the Queen as their head of state.

Yet the tiresome narratives of relevance and relative mediocrity which trail after the Games like aerobatic jet plumes obscure a central point that the Birmingham 2022 opening ceremony exhibited with such eloquence: the so-called ‘Friendly’ Games is better placed than ever to confirm its status as a real catalyst for change.

For once, the ceremony’s storyline, of a group of young athletes exploring the city’s struggles and successes in search of a brighter future, struck an obvious chord.

Sexagenarians excepted, Birmingham is a young city, with almost 40 per cent of its population