Australia gave these Games away. Glasgow picked them up, cut them down, and starts day two this afternoon.

The World Cup finished on Sunday last week. Spain beat Argentina by the only goal in the final, and the night before, in the game nobody claims to want, England beat France 6-4 for third place, which is a scoreline that belongs in a different sport entirely.

Then the noise stopped, the way it always does. A month and a half of a country arranging its evenings around a television, and then a Monday.

Four days later Glasgow started again, and almost nobody outside Scotland noticed.

These are the Games that Victoria walked away from. Australia's state government pulled out over cost, and for a while it looked as though the twenty-third Commonwealth Games might simply not happen. Glasgow took them on with conditions attached: ten sports rather than the twenty staged at Birmingham, every venue inside an eight-mile radius, using buildings the city already owned. The money came from an investment of around £100m from the Commonwealth Games Federation plus commercial income, with no UK or Scottish public funds going into delivery. Victoria paid the Federation A$380m in compensation for walking away. Scotland's fourth time hosting, and the least extravagant by a distance.

The numbers are worth holding still for a second. Glasgow is staging these Games on a budget of roughly £150m. Victoria walked away saying it could not do it for less than about A$6bn. Every other major sporting event of the past twenty years has been sold on what it would build. This one was sold on what it would not.

Day two is this afternoon and evening. At the Glasgow International Arena, the England women's artistic gymnastics team defend their team title, with Canada, Australia and Wales all in it. At Tollcross, eight swimming and para-swimming golds go in the evening session, with Adam Ramsay-Peaty defending his 100m breaststroke title. There is boxing, there is bowls indoors for the first time in the history of these Games, and in the 3x3 wheelchair basketball, India field para athletes in a team sport for the first time.

Watch the gymnastics if you watch one thing. A team final is four minutes of work per apparatus and about fifteen years of getting there, and the arena in Glasgow is close enough to the floor that you can hear the landing.

That is the bit I keep coming back to this week. Elsewhere in the country, a great deal is being said about giving people skills, and some of what is on offer takes twenty minutes and ends in a badge. It may well be useful. I am not sneering at it.

But nobody in that arena this afternoon is confused about what a skill costs. It costs years, most of them unwatched, in rooms in cities that are not hosting anything. It produces nothing. It changes no one's circumstances but the athlete's own. And a city that could not afford to be grand about it has put up the lights anyway, because some things are worth doing in front of other people.

There is your Saturday.