Men’s triathlon: Hayden Wilde’s penalty is for not putting his cycling helmet away correctly in the box. What a sport. They’ve been going for fifty minutes now. Wilde has yielded and now England’s Alex Yee is getting an incredible reception as he crosses the line first for the first gold medal of Birmingham 2022!
After a suitably bombastic opening ceremony the Commonwealth Games begin in earnest today.
We kick off (roll off? get rolling?) with lawn bowls and para lawn bowls this morning, with badminton, hockey, rugby sevens and artistic gymnastics to follow from 9am onwards.
The schedule for day one also includes table tennis and para table tennis, cycling, swimming, T20 cricket, triathlon, boxing, squash, netball, 3×3 basketball and 3×3 wheelchair basketball, so it’s fair to say there should be something for everyone.
The individual triathlon is probably the most-anticipated event of the day, with Team England’s Alex Yee, a silver medalist in the same event at Tokyo 2020, among those competing in the men’s final. His main rival is New Zealand’s Hayden Wilde, with both expected to end up on the podium.
In the women’s final, Georgia Taylor-Brown will also go in search of a podium finish. She will be up against Bermuda’s Flora Duffy, who pipped her to a gold medal in Tokyo.
How will the medal table look by the end of the day? No idea, honestly. Whatever happens, let’s hope that, in the words of Nadine Dorries, the Games “puts Birmingham on the map”. It was famously impossible to locate the United Kingdom’s second-largest city before today.
