Commonwealth Games chairman Peter Beattie calls Australians 'a pack of whingers' as fallout from Gold Coast continues

Flag bearer for Australia, Kurt Fearnley and his Australian teammates enjoy the atmosphere during the Closing Ceremony for the Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games. Photo / Getty

The Commonwealth Games was supposed to be the event that showcased Australia and its sporting prowess to the world.

And showcase we did, falling just two medals short of a whopping 200 and blitzing the competition to come an easy first on the medal tally.

But Australian domination aside, there was an aspect of the 11-day event that left a sour taste in the mouths of other Commonwealth nations.

In a scathing article published by The Times, British writer Rick Broadbent wrote it was the nation's "jingoism and hollering" that "drowned out the many pluses" of the Gold Coast games.

"Turn down the jingoism Australia, this wasn't the Olympics (or even close)," Broadbent tweeted.

Some nations haven't responded well to Australia's perceived 'jingoism' at the Games. Photo / Getty

And it's no denying Australia's apparent jingoism — an extreme form of patriotism — was on display at the Commonwealth Games event.

Channel Seven regularly interrupted their broadcasts to showcase the medal board, which at one point saw Australia's total sitting at double any other competing nation.

Even Sunrise dived in on the medal boasting, with co-host David Koch poking fun at the Brits last week when comparing their medal tally to the Aussies'.

The host made a point of adding up the number of medals the United Kingdom would have — if they were a combined nation competing at the Olympics — and joking how the Aussies still had them covered.

"I am feeling a bit sorry for the English, though. They have double our population and we are just flogging them in the medal count with 50 gold medals," Koch said. "What I thought I would do is go back to the old Great Britain, bring in Scotland and Wales to boost their confidence.

"I have done a medal tally, our gold medal tally is 50 gold medals and as a combined, they only have 37.

"Their total medals is just 125, still just to make you feel better, you are still not as good. In total Great Britain has 65 million people.

"I just thought I would do that calculation."

It was moments like that that clearly didn't sit well with the Brits.

"Enduring memories, though, will be tainted by the rampant jingoism of the host broadcasters and an unbridled desire to thrash everybody out of sight," Broadbent wrote.

"Most countries have treated this fortnight as a Commonwealth Games but Channel Seven thinks it is an Olympics with bells on."

Perhaps it was Australia's lacklustre effort at the past few Olympics that led to the country's desperation to impress — pressure that only increased because of the home soil advantage.

According to The Times, Australia's desperate desire to impress could be summed up in the moment Australian marathon runner Michael Shelley ran past his collapsed competitor, Scotsman Callum Hawkins, to claim the gold medal just minutes later.

"You can't really blame him, and Robbie Simpson, another Scot, kept on running too," Broadbent wrote.

"But it would have been the moment."

The Commonwealth Games wasn't without those moments, however.

Scottish athlete Callum Hawkins collapsed during the men's marathon. Photo / Getty

Three Aussie runners, who were praised the world over, said they just wanted to show a "bit of sportsmanship" when they waited on the track for Lineo Chaka of Lesotho, the final runner of the women's 10,000m, to finish the race.

"You see these moments in time where an athlete helps someone, like a Brownlee [Alistair] helping his brother [Jonny] off the floor because he is completely wrecked," Commonwealth Games Federation CEO David Grevemberg told reporters, referencing the 2016 World Triathlon Championships.

"Can we really expect an athlete to do that? We would hope they show that care and empathy, but you can't script that."

The Brownlee brothers, triathlon heavyweights from the UK, nabbed silver medals at the Gold Coast games and told NewsCorp it was "nothing to be embarrassed about".

"Silver is nothing to be embarrassed about, I would have rather have gotten gold though," Jonny said. "Unfortunately we were beaten by a better Australian team at the end of the day."

And despite the Games being a ratings hit for Channel Seven, there's no denying many Commonwealth nations are falling out of love and lacking interest in the Commonwealth Games.

Gold Coasters fled their city by the thousands in a bid to avoid traffic and Games chaos, having a detrimental effect on local business.

And even when Birmingham excitedly showed off their city as the destination for the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Sunday's panned closing ceremony, few remembered the UK city was actually the second city awarded the 2022 gig.

The South African city of Durban originally won the 2022 games but was stripped of it after it couldn't handle the associated costs.

The inability of many Commonwealth nations to afford the economic pressures of staging the Commonwealth Games means Perth is already being touted as the favourite to host the event in 2026.

Even Commonwealth Games chairman Peter Beattie seems well and truly fed up with the commentary around the event.

Commonwealth Games chairman Peter Beattie. Photo / Getty

The chairman was quick to apologise on Monday morning, where he accepted all the blame for Sunday night's closing ceremony, specifically the decision to not broadcast the athletes entering the stadium.

"You can have a blame game from now until eternity but the reality is, I'm chairman of the organising committee, the buck stops with us. I'm not interested in blaming anyone but us," Beattie said.

"That's our fault ... that's my fault ... I apologise to you and anyone else."

But by Monday night, Beattie was done, calling the nation a "pack of whingers".

"I just think one of the problems is that we are getting to a stage of being a pack of whingers ... I just say to Australia we're bigger than this. We should be about positive things, about building things, about doing things and we shouldn't try to tear down people who want to do that," he said on his regular slot on Sky News.

Responding to claims from Channel Seven commentator Johanna Griggs that the network had no idea the athletes wouldn't be broadcast during the closing ceremony, Beattie said they needed to remember the people behind the organisation.

"Often some of the commentators who are very self-indulgent forget this — there is a very good team at GOLDOC, which is the organising committee, and whenever you get sort of beat-ups and so on the morale of those wonderful individuals actually is affected … I work with these people, they're non-political, they worked incredibly hard, and delivered one of the best Commonwealth Games Australia's ever had," he said.

Controversies aside, the Gold Coast's go at the Commonwealth Games was a successful one.

Organisers dubbed it "the inclusive games" and inclusive it was.

There was an almost even amount of medals up for grabs for men and women and parasport was completely integrated into the 11-day competition.

But whether or not the Commonwealth has much room — or interest — left in its heart for the quadrennial event is a question that the Gold Coast was unable to answer.

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