New Zealand will march into the OVO Hydro arena in Glasgow on Friday morning New Zealand time with one of the smallest teams it has sent to a Commonwealth Games in more than four decades, and with several of the sports that usually fill the country’s medal tally missing from the programme altogether.
The opening ceremony starts at 6am on Friday 24 July New Zealand time, with competition running through to Monday 3 August. RNZ reports the New Zealand team numbers 114 athletes, the smallest contingent since Brisbane in 1982. Organisers have confirmed the ceremony will be staged entirely indoors, a first for the Games, with Scottish singer-songwriter KT Tunstall headlining.
The reason the team is smaller has less to do with New Zealand than with the Games themselves. Glasgow only picked up the event two years ago after the Australian state of Victoria pulled out over rising costs, and what Scotland agreed to host is a stripped-back version of the old model. Where Birmingham 2022 ran 20 sports, Glasgow runs ten, plus six para sports, across four venues in the one city, with 215 gold medals on offer over 11 days of competition.
Those cuts land awkwardly for New Zealand. Rugby sevens, hockey, triathlon, road cycling, cricket and squash have all been dropped, and every one of them has delivered New Zealand medals in recent Games. Squash alone produced Joelle King, who carried the flag in Birmingham. The events that remain are athletics, swimming, track cycling, netball, boxing, judo, weightlifting, gymnastics, lawn bowls and 3×3 basketball.
What is left still suits New Zealand reasonably well. Track cycling survives, and the velodrome has been the country’s most productive venue at recent Games. The Spinoff noted this week that cyclists brought home 10 of New Zealand’s 20 gold medals in 2022. Nineteen riders have been selected for Glasgow, the second largest group in the team behind athletics.
The track and field squad of 21 was named in June and reads unusually strongly for a Commonwealth Games. Hamish Kerr goes to Scotland holding world, Olympic and Commonwealth high jump titles at the same time. Tom Walsh returns to defend his shot put crown. Geordie Beamish arrives as the reigning world steeplechase champion after winning in Tokyo last year, the first world title New Zealand has won in a men’s track event. The women’s pole vault sends three athletes in Imogen Ayris, Eliza McCartney and Olivia McTaggart, which is a strange abundance for a small country in a technical event.
Athletics New Zealand chief executive Cam Mitchell said when the squad was announced on 15 June that it was one of the strongest athletics contingents New Zealand had assembled for a Commonwealth Games, with “exceptional depth and real medal aspirations across multiple events”. Qualifying standards were set high enough that most of the team should be in contention rather than making up numbers.
One name will be absent. Shot putter Jacko Gill, a silver medallist in Birmingham, withdrew after picking up an injury at a competition in Madrid on 16 July, leaving Walsh and Nick Palmer to carry the event. It is a loss in a discipline where New Zealand has quietly been one of the best countries in the world for over a decade.
In the pool, the 13-strong swimming team is led by Erika Fairweather and Lewis Clareburt, both world champions in 2024, and includes seven athletes making their Commonwealth Games debut. Fairweather, who set a national 200m freestyle record of 1min 55.06sec at the national championships, said in June that “Glasgow is going to be an amazing experience and I’m really looking forward to the competition. I’m really excited to have the opportunity to compete for my first Commonwealth Games medal.” Head coach Graham Hill said “the depth in this squad, across relays, individual events and Para swimming gives us real reason for confidence.”
The Silver Ferns take a 12-player group under Dame Noeline Taurua that includes nine Commonwealth Games debutants, captained by Karin Burger with Kate Heffernan as her deputy. Netball remains the one team sport in the programme where New Zealand starts among the favourites, and with Australia in the draw the final, if the Ferns get there, will be the same fixture it always is.
Former weightlifting champion Nigel Avery leads the team as chef de mission, a role he was appointed to in late 2024. The rest of the squad breaks down as 12 lawn bowlers, eight judo competitors, seven boxers, seven weightlifters, seven gymnasts, and the 3×3 basketball squads, with bowls moving indoors for the first time in Games history.
There are a couple of oddities worth watching. The men’s and women’s 1500m has reverted to the mile for the first time in 60 years, a nod to the distance’s history in Britain and a distance New Zealanders have some sentimental claim to. Scotstoun Stadium, a modest suburban ground compared with the stadiums that have hosted recent Games, takes the athletics.
Whether a ten-sport Games in four venues counts as a revival or a managed decline is a fair argument, and it will be had plenty over the next fortnight. What is not in doubt is that Glasgow has kept the event alive at a point when nobody else wanted it. For a country that has competed at every Commonwealth Games since the first in 1930, and which has generally done well out of them, that is worth something.
Coverage in New Zealand is on Sky Sport, with free-to-air coverage on Three and streaming on ThreeNow.
Will you be following the Games, and do the sports that were cut change what the event means to you? Let us know in the comments below.
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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