This title mixes up various phrases and facts. To quit while you are ahead means that things are going well, very well, and to continue might risk things going wrong and you lose the benefits of what you have gained. To quit while you are ahead is not used in sport, not at all. It is the opposite of sports competition because all sports competition is about winning, or coming as near as possible to winning.
The Commonwealth Games 2026 has just finished in Glasgow, on the 2nd August, and since then has been the European Athletics Championships the 10-18th August held in Birmingham.
And now today, unbelievably to us cavemen, is news of the Chinese World Humanoid Robot Games. As this is the Second Chinese World Humanoid Robot Games there would have been a First, but a year ago is so long ago in world events. It did stir the memory of something a year ago, but back then it was quirky and something teccie, and as the Chinese are very clever then it is just an extension of their work capabilities and application of political, economic and human work. This year however, it is both more prominent in the news, and comes at a time of so soon after Glasgow and Birmingham.
Glasgow (picture taken by this blog) was termed “the second city of the British Empire” during the boom years of 19th and early 20th century. It is now falling down, and burning down. The weather during the recent Games was first really, really hot and humid, the like of which has never been experienced up here before, and which suited the athletes with melanin in their skin from hot and humid countries, but not the pale northerners, and then had some more usual cool, windy and very wet days. The cool wet days were a shock for those athletes from hot counties who can become very unwell in sudden cold and wet and get cramp or worse injuries, also chills and flu.
Modern day Glasgow, (picture taken by this blog) shows the juxtaposition of recent historical fortunes. Recent because the last few 100 years of fortunes made in the British Empire (with a lot of hard work going on in logistics and production as well as the problematic issue of humans transported across the Atlantic) was also the period of substantial stone buildings, sandstone or granite, with craftsmanship, knowledge, structural solidity, all without modern tech or cranes, such as the above photo. Next to this sandstone building, in Robertson Street, is the very modern JP Morgan building, and this was constructed when modern tech and digital resources clearly make a very different kind of building, all shiny and modern and much, much taller than the previous tall buildings.
Glasgow hosted the 2026 Commonwealth Games, after stepping in to rescue the situation. Somewhere in the air has been the question hanging that a peak is reached. No one on an 1,500m elite race on the world athletics track would consider coming into the final bend, 5m ahead of the nearest behind and think, ‘Sod it, I can’t be bothered to finish this,’ and just slope off the track and lie down in boredom. Not at all, it’s just not what athletes are wired for.
However, in this moment when the next Commonwealth Games, 4 years ahead, in Gujarat 2030 is being given a big fanfare, already, and the plans being laid for a spectacular Games, is this a moment where humanoids would be advised to pause? Glasgow hosted the Commonwealth Games in 2014, New Delhi in 2010, and now here we are with Glasgow and India very close again. The links over so many millennia with Indo-Europeans are fascinating and many cultural and linguistics basis exists, playing chess for just one, and despite the chaos created by British empire dividing up ancient tribal and ethnic regions, there is a real bond of communication and practices between India and Britain. And from that, this is an ideal moment just to pause on this matter of the Commonwealth Games post 2026.
The European Athletics in Birmingham, just finished, was just down the road from Stourbridge, a mere 10 miles away, and Stourbridge has just had a major wildfire. Buildings in Glasgow with no money to restore them are burning down or falling down, burning down from dodgy insurance claims, old wiring, or thrown away vapes which cause fires. Many places in Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, England, Eire, the Isle of Mann, and the lands known as the Scottish Borders have been and are still burning. The rain that some of us are now fortunate enough to have falling from the sky is the most welcome ever, and many places are not that fortunate. 2027 is forecast to be even hotter, – even hotter – and this is a seriously bad prospect. The year 2030 is nearly here, and who knows what will happen by then, just as the plans are getting into action for a spectacular Games in India.
This is why news of the Humanoid Robot Games in China could be the solution to this conundrum of what to do with the British Empire, or Commonwealth. Or any large international sports event, or any regional sports event like the European Athletics Championships (what does Europe mean these days?). A humanoid robot does not get sunburnt, or feel the cold, 16 countries have entered this 2026 Humanoid Robot Games which makes a proper international competition, and 2,000 robots participate in so many activities, including real life activity of doing the laundry.
Is the solution to the increasing questions in international sport actually the robots? 2028 is the next Summer Olympics, due in Los Angeles, and 2030 is the Winter Olympics in the French Alps. From the real human practices of honouring the gods of our region, the appropriation of the honouring of Zeus in Olympia every 4 years has taken a very strange trajectory in its modern appearance. With the exponential heat likely melting all Alpine snow by 2030 and transport failures of trains and planes and all the logistics of mass travel, and the heat of summer events creating a very unfair conditions, is it time to hand over to the humanoid robot, and national teams instead send their avatar robot. In a complete systems failure humans would only compete within their local sports region again anyway, and the medals being won by the humanoids (presumably without any emotion) would still come to the origin nation.
Not only athletics and the Olympics, but the last year has raised so many questions on international football under FIFA that this solution of substituting humanoid robots could be very useful. To return football to regions of relevant climate, as this blog has argued previously, would be balanced by FIFA overseeing the robot football competitions, and this would likely bring much less financial questions, or the price of tickets, because not many people would be more than £5 or £10 to see such a game.
Yes, to quit while you are ahead is never done in competitive sport, but if the writing on the wall for international sport showing large over the last year is hearkened to, and there is the robot waiting for the baton, to grasp it and continue its sprint down the track, is this not the time to address these pressing issues?