Delhi is a place you really fall in love with: Australian Chef-de-Mission

Australian contingent Chef de mission Steve Moneghetti has said he is really looking forward to returning here for the Commonwealth Games in October. “It's such a cosmopolitan place and a place you really fall in love with,” he told the media on the sidelines of a ceremony in Melbourne on Tuesday to mark the visit of the Queen's Baton 2010 Delhi.

“I was there a month ago and it was very safe and secure,” Moneghetti said.

Moneghetti, who won gold in the marathon event in Victoria in 1994 and was mayor of the Commonwealth Games Village in Melbourne in 2006, ran the last leg of a short Queen’s Baton Relay 2010 along the Yarra River along with four-time Commonwealth champion and Sydney 2000 Olympic 400m gold medalist Cathy Freeman.

Freeman said if she were not retired from track and field sport, security concerns would not stop her going to Delhi in October. “As an athlete I was pretty ruthless and very focussed,” Freeman said. “I was very unfazed by any kind of external goings-on, once I knew what my target was, I stayed committed. Nothing could really take me away from an arena of competition. My priority was just to compete and compete against the best there was,” she said.

Australian Commonwealth Games Association Chief Executive Mr, Perry Crosswhite said their position had not changed and the country will send a team to the Games. “Certainly it (the bombing in Bangalore) is not a good thing, but it doesn't affect our current position,” Mr. Crosswhite said.

“Right now, we're going to the Games and as we said all along, if athletes (or officials) don't want to go to the Games, that's their decision and it won't be held against them. I'm very confident the actual athletes will be protected, the safest place will be the (Games) Village in Delhi, the venues and the transport routes there and from.”