A very apropos article given the current Gay Games debate....

http://www.iht.com/articles/115766.html

What's in a Games? Sports fêtes abound
Christopher Clarey/IHT  International Herald Tribune
Thursday, October 30, 2003
In the Arena

The inaugural Afro-Asian Games are under way in Hyderabad, India, generating very little interest outside of Hyderabad. But then that's what happens when you launch a new, can-miss product in a glutted market.
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There are Games for all seasons; Games for all regions and beyond reason. But they keep coming, each one carving out a narrower niche in a more crowded multisport whole.
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Should we deploy energy and editorials to try to stop them? Absolutely not. It's only a Games, after all, although one imagines that some of these Games can leave their organizers and hosts with some serious bills to pay.
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There are Arctic Games and Arab Games; Baltic Sea Games and Bolivarian Games; East Asian, West Asian, Central Asian and Southeast Asian Games. There are Gay
Games, Gorge Games and Gravity Games; Mediterranean Games and Micronesian Games; and the fast-growing, franchise-spinning X Games.
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There are World Air Games; World Corporate Games; World Police and Firemen's Games; even World Medical and Health Games. If the doctors weren't at the top of their games, there would never have been a World Transplant Games, launched by an English surgeon in 1978 for athletes who had undergone lifesaving organ transplants. Next edition: 2005 in Ontario, Canada.
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Above all, there are (cue the theme music and baritone-voiced narrator) the Olympic Games, revived in 1896 thanks to the perseverance of the Baron Pierre de Coubertin, a French blue blood who would have been quite happy to keep the whole grandiose, five-ringed affair as aristocratic as he was.
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No one is thinking quite so big anymore. Not since the Goodwill Games, launched by the CNN founder Ted Turner to promote Cold War understanding, went belly up. That
sounded like an alternative worth pursuing when the International Olympic Committee and its president, Juan Antonio Samaranch, were busy snapping up the perquisites of unelected privilege. The IOC eventually pulled its hand far enough out of the cookie jar to salvage its preeminence, and the Goodwill Games were consigned to the goodwill bin after a final spasm of optimism in Brisbane in 2001.
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Optimism still prevails, however. Why else would the Afro-Asian Games be up and running when there are already perfectly well-established African Games and Asian Games?
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The byword now is playing to your audience instead of the globe; playing to your target group, even if its small enough to be a focus group. Or even if it's a group whose very members are small. Consider the World Dwarf Games, started in 1993 in Chicago and scheduled for France in 2005. Why shouldn't the little people get their Games, too? The little countries do. Every two years since 1985, a collection of Europe's anachronistic duchies and tax havens have joined together to celebrate the Games of the Small European States, open only to those IOC-recognized European nations with populations of less than one million. The eight founding members - Andorra, Cyprus, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco and San Marino - remain the only members.
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If Iceland, Malta or Cyprus ever decide that this small pond is getting too big they could always decide to take their balls, boards and anthems and compete in the Island Games instead. Founded in 1985, these are also biennial Games, and just to prove that no man on an island is an island when it comes to cash, they also have a title sponsor, which means their official, headline-ready name is the NatWest Island Games.
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The athletes in play at the Island Games are distinctly short on global reach. But every barnyard has its pecking order, and while the strutting roosters at the Olympics are Security Council members like the United States, Russia and China, the heavyweights at this year's Island Games in St. Peter Port, Guernsey were the hosts.
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Guernsey, a British Crown dependency in the Channel Islands about 30 miles off France, led the medal table with 127, 55 of them gold, followed by Jersey with 115  medals, the Isle of Man with 88, Bermuda with 37 and Gotland, Sweden's delightful isle in the Baltic, with 32.
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Each delegation now arrives with a bottle of water, filled up at its own shores. At the opening ceremony, all the bottles are poured into a single fountain, the Island Games antidote to the Olympic flame, which is kept bubbling until the competition concludes.
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Spend enough time thinking about Games, and you start to see hints of method in the madness; code amidst the garble.
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There are the Games whose existence depends on bodies of water: Baltic Sea Games; Black Sea Games; Mediterranean Games et cetera, which also includes a
sub-category of Games for which you might consider switching nationality and even swimming a few laps in order to take part. Those would be the Indian Ocean Islands Games, last staged by Mauritius; the South Pacific Games, last staged by Fiji; or better yet, the South Pacific Mini Games, open only to the tiniest of South Pacific atolls and territories and scheduled for Palau in 2005.
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There are the Games whose existence depends on colonial ties, none bigger than the Commonwealth Games. Quadrennial, as all the best sorts of Games must be, they are reserved for what was and what little remains of the British Empire. In the same vain vein, there are the Francophone games and the Dutch Commonwealth Games, once open to the Netherlands, Curaçao, Aruba and Suriname. No word yet on whether the Soviet Union Games are in the planning phase, but there already is a well-established anti-colonial Games: the Bolivarian Games, open to the Latin American countries Simon Bolivar liberated from Spanish rule in the 19th century.
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Most any connection, you see, is enough connection to warrant a sports festival, and though Africa and Asia have yet to develop the same sort of geopolitical alliance as Europe and the United States, they now have something Europe and the Americans somehow still lack: a bicontinental Games. They took their time doing it. Originally scheduled for New Delhi in 1983, it took 20 years for the Afro-Asian Games to begin for real. A true star or two has shown up in Hyderabad, including the Namibian sprinter Frankie Fredericks.  But for now and probably quite a bit longer than that, the Afro-Asian Games' many rivals for talent and television have no reason to sweat. The Games the Indians really want to host are the Commonwealth Games in 2010. Perhaps they should have dubbed these the Gateway Games instead.