Look at India’s Commonwealth Games medal count on its own, across three editions, and it tells a story of decline: 101 medals in 2010, 61 in 2022, 39 in 2026. Read only that line, and it looks like a great sporting nation quietly fading. Look underneath the number, at what each of those Games actually contained, and the story turns out to be almost the opposite. It is a story about a home advantage that inflated one number enormously, a sport programme that has been repeatedly rewritten by hosts with their own priorities, and a country slowly finding new places to stand on the podium as the old ones are taken away.
2010: A Peak Built at Home
Begin with 2010, because it is the number every comparison since has had to live in the shadow of. Hosting the Games in New Delhi, India won 101 medals, 39 gold, 26 silver and 36 bronze, finishing second on the table behind only Australia. It remains the only time India has crossed a hundred medals at a Commonwealth Games, and it is unlikely to be repeated soon.
That total needs a caveat that gets left out of most tellings. Host nations at the Commonwealth Games have always tended to enjoy a rush of medals, partly through the comfort of home conditions and partly because hosts get real influence over which sports and events make the programme. Delhi 2010 included full-scale shooting and wrestling programmes and a comparatively generous archery and tennis slate, precisely the disciplines in which India was strongest at the time. When the Games moved on to Glasgow in 2014, without a home crowd and with archery and tennis dropped and shooting and wrestling both trimmed, India’s tally fell straight back to 64. The 2010 peak was real, but it was also a special case, built as much by the calendar as by the athletes.
2022: Settling Into Fourth
By Birmingham 2022, India had settled into a more familiar shape. The country won 61 medals, 22 gold, 16 silver and 23 bronze, finishing fourth, its position now roughly stable for a decade rather than swinging wildly. The pillars were the ones Indian sport had built over years of dedicated investment: wrestling, boxing, weightlifting, badminton, table tennis, and a hockey team that has long been central to the country’s Commonwealth identity. Together, a set of nine sports that featured at Birmingham but not at Glasgow, among them wrestling, badminton, table tennis and hockey, had accounted for a share of India’s sixty-one medals there. On paper, 2022 looked like the platform from which 2026 would be built.
2026: The Door That Closed
It was not built on that platform, because the platform was largely removed. Glasgow 2026 ran a sharply reduced programme, cutting nine sports that had featured in Birmingham, including precisely the ones that had underwritten so much of India’s recent success: wrestling, badminton, table tennis, hockey and shooting all disappeared from the schedule. That decision alone explains most of the fall from 61 medals to 39 far better than any theory of declining Indian sport. Judged purely by what was actually on offer, comparing India’s tally across the three Games is closer to comparing three different competitions than three editions of the same one.
What is genuinely revealing is how India responded to that narrower door. The country finished fourth again, with 39 medals, 13 gold, 17 silver and nine bronze, arriving there only on the final day of competition after a late surge of sixteen medals. Boxing carried much of that surge and produced the finest Commonwealth Games campaign in its history, ten medals in all, including seven golds, the most any nation has ever won in the sport at a single Games. Where one door closed, several fighters kicked another one open.
The Story Beneath the Table
The deeper story of Glasgow, though, sits away from the main medal table entirely, in India’s para campaign. It was the country’s best, seven medals in all, three gold, two silver and two bronze, matching India’s combined total from every previous Commonwealth Games put together in a single fortnight. Six of those seven came from para athletics alone, and they ended a wait of twenty years for an Indian medal on that particular podium. Dilip Gavit, Sharmila Dhankar and Soman Rana each won gold; Gavit even set a Games record along the way. It is easy for a headline number like thirty-nine to swallow a detail like this, but it may be the single most significant shift in this whole comparison: proof that Indian sport’s growth is not confined to the events that make the six o’clock news.
Able-bodied athletics told its own quieter story of firsts. Gulveer Singh became the first Indian to win two individual track and field medals at a single Commonwealth Games, silver in the men’s ten thousand metres and bronze in the five thousand, in events where the country had rarely troubled the podium before. Tejaswin Shankar, who had already won India’s first Commonwealth Games high jump medal in 2022, switched disciplines entirely and became India’s first-ever Commonwealth Games decathlon medallist, taking bronze despite an injury setback along the way. Neeraj Chopra, who missed Birmingham through injury, returned to add a javelin silver of his own. None of these was sports where India had a settled tradition of Commonwealth success. Each is a small, separate proof that the country’s sporting base is widening even as its traditional strongholds are being legislated out of the Games.
Three Games, Three Different Stories
Put the three editions side by side and a fairer picture appears than the bare medal counts allow. 2010 was a genuine peak, but one inflated by a host nation’s ability to load the programme with its own strengths, and it was never a realistic baseline. 2022 was India settling into a broad, well-established fourth place, built on sports the country had spent decades developing. 2026 was neither a peak nor simply a decline; it was India’s traditional route to medals being closed off by a shrinking Games programme, forcing a fourth-place finish built on almost entirely different foundations, a boxing team performing like never before and a para campaign finally realising years of investment. The country did not get worse at winning medals. It got better at winning them in places it had not won them before, right as the places it used to win them stopped being on offer.
The Baton Now Passes to Ahmedabad
That shifting foundation now has to hold up something much larger. As the closing ceremony in Glasgow drew to a close, Scotland formally handed the Commonwealth Games flag and ceremonial baton to India, received by Neeraj Chopra, Indian Olympic Association president PT Usha and Gujarat’s deputy chief minister Harsh Sanghavi. Ahmedabad will host the 2030 Games, the historic centenary edition, and India will become only the second country after Australia to host the Commonwealth Games more than once. As hosts, Indian officials will again have some say over which sports make the programme, the same lever that shaped Delhi’s enormous total in 2010. But the lesson of Glasgow, if it is learned, is that a great Commonwealth Games campaign no longer has to be built on the same handful of sports it always was. India arrives at its second turn as host having just shown it can find medals in a decathlon, a five thousand metre final and a para shot put circle, and not only in the wrestling hall and the shooting range. That may turn out to be the more durable achievement of Glasgow 2026: not the fourth place finish, but the discovery of how many different ways there now are to get there.
References
- Olympics.com: “Commonwealth Games 2026: India medals tally and winners list, full table.” https://www.olympics.com
- Wikipedia: “India at the 2026 Commonwealth Games.” https://en.wikipedia.org
- Olympics.com: “Commonwealth Games 2026 athletics: results, scores and medals of all Indian athletes.” https://www.olympics.com
- Al Jazeera: “India: 64 medals but short on promise” (Glasgow 2014). https://www.aljazeera.com
- The Tribune: “Glasgow hands over Commonwealth Games flag, baton to India ahead of Ahmedabad CWG 2030.” https://www.tribuneindia.com
- News on Air (All India Radio): “Ahmedabad to Host 2030 Commonwealth Games.” https://www.newsonair.gov.in