New Zealand has lost one of its most experienced throwers two days out from the Commonwealth Games. Shot putter Jacko Gill has been ruled out of the Glasgow team with an injury picked up while he was warming up for a meeting in Madrid last week, and he will not travel with the rest of the athletics contingent.
Neither Athletics New Zealand nor the New Zealand Olympic Committee has said what the injury is. The wire report confirming the withdrawal on Tuesday described it only as an undisclosed injury sustained in the warm-up, and RNZ carried the news on its sport pages the same morning. Gill is 31 and has been throwing at senior international level for well over a decade, so the absence of detail will do nothing to settle nerves among people who have followed his career.
His is the second withdrawal from the New Zealand team in the space of a few days. Boxer Wendell Stanley, one of seven fighters named for Glasgow in June, has also been pulled from the squad. The New Zealand Olympic Committee has said only that Stanley’s withdrawal is a private matter, and nothing published so far connects the two departures. Stanley was one of only two boxers in the squad with previous Commonwealth Games experience, having competed at Birmingham in 2022.
For Gill, missing a Games is a genuine loss rather than a footnote. He arrived as one of the most talked about teenagers in world athletics, winning the world junior title in 2010 at 15 years and 213 days, which made him the youngest male champion in the history of that meeting and pushed Usain Bolt down the list. He won the junior title again in 2012, holds the world junior record with the six kilogram implement at 23.00m, and has a senior best of 22.12m set in 2023. He has been to four Olympic Games and won silver at the Birmingham Commonwealth Games in 2022, behind his long time teammate Tom Walsh.
He has also spent a large part of that career managing his body. RNZ has previously reported on the toll his training methods have taken, and a groin problem cost him the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, the last time the city hosted. There is a certain grim symmetry in Glasgow taking a second Games off him twelve years apart, though nobody has suggested the two injuries are related.
New Zealand still has a strong hand in the men’s shot put. Tom Walsh goes to Glasgow as the defending champion, having won gold on the Gold Coast in 2018 and again at Birmingham in 2022, and he remains the most decorated male athlete in the history of the World Athletics Indoor Championships with seven medals from that event. Alongside him is Nick Palmer, an eight time national medallist who trains with Walsh in Christchurch and who will be making his Commonwealth Games debut. What New Zealand loses with Gill’s withdrawal is the depth that made a clean sweep of the podium a live conversation rather than a fantasy.
The withdrawals land on a team that was already much smaller than usual. RNZ reported in June that New Zealand named 116 athletes for Glasgow, against 234 who went to Birmingham four years ago. That is not a selection decision so much as a consequence of the Games themselves shrinking. Glasgow stepped in as host after the Australian state of Victoria walked away from the 2026 event on cost grounds, and the version that survived runs to ten sports rather than the nineteen contested in Birmingham. Sports New Zealand has traditionally done well in, including road cycling, triathlon, rugby sevens and squash, simply do not appear on the programme.
Chef de mission Nigel Avery framed the smaller team as a mix of newcomers and veterans when it was announced. “For some, this will be their first time wearing the fern at a Games,” he said. Sixty three of the athletes named are Games debutants. The average age of the team is 27.7 years, and gymnast Misha Koudinov is heading to his sixth Commonwealth Games.
The boxing team travels with its own complications. Head coach Billy Meehan is not going to Glasgow while a Sport Integrity Commission investigation into Boxing New Zealand and allegations of bullying and favouritism continues, a matter first reported by the NZ Herald and 1News and still unresolved after more than a year. No findings have been made public. Separately, boxer Elenoa Lilo had an appeal against her non selection rejected before the team departed. None of that has been linked by any official source to Stanley’s withdrawal, which the NZOC has kept private.
The Games open in Glasgow on Thursday 23 July and run through to 2 August, across four venues, with 74 nations and territories taking part. New Zealand’s medal hopes lean heavily on track cycling, where Ellesse Andrews heads the team, on swimmer Lewis Clareburt, on high jumper Hamish Kerr, and on the throwers. Walsh carrying the shot put on his own is a smaller story than Walsh and Gill going at it again, but it is still one of the better chances in the New Zealand team.
Whether Gill gets another crack at a Commonwealth Games will depend on what this injury turns out to be and how the next four years treat him. He would be 35 by the time the next edition comes round. For now the only confirmed fact is the one nobody wanted, which is that he is not going.
Have you followed Jacko Gill’s career since he burst onto the scene as a teenager, and how do you rate New Zealand’s chances in Glasgow with a stripped back programme? Leave a comment below and tell us what you think.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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