The Glasgow Commonwealth Games finished on Sunday with New Zealand sixth on the medal table, having won 36 medals from a team of just 114 athletes. It is one more medal than the country’s high performance system had set as its target, and it came from the smallest New Zealand team sent to a Commonwealth Games since Brisbane in 1982.
The final tally was 10 gold, 14 silver and 12 bronze. Australia finished on top with 70 gold medals and 171 in total, England were second with 29 gold and 110 medals, and Canada were third with 62 medals. India finished fourth with 39 medals and hosts Scotland were fifth. New Zealand sat immediately behind them.
Most of the drama came at the end. New Zealand claimed eight medals on the final day, two of them gold. The Silver Ferns beat Jamaica 56-48 to take the netball title for the first time in 16 years, and Sydnee Andrews won the women’s over 78kg judo, New Zealand’s first Commonwealth judo gold in 36 years. Before that final surge the team was sitting on eight gold medals and looked likely to fall short of its target.
The target itself was modest by recent standards. New Zealand went to Glasgow aiming for at least 35 medals, well down on what the country has managed at the past three editions, because there was simply far less to compete for. Glasgow 2026 was a deliberately shrunken Games, run across four venues with 10 sports, about 2,700 athletes from 74 nations and territories, and no athletes’ village. Only 645 medals were on offer in total.
That context matters when you look at how the New Zealand team actually performed. The 114 athletes who went to Scotland covered athletics, cycling, swimming, lawn bowls, judo, boxing, weightlifting, gymnastics, netball and 3×3 basketball, with six integrated para sports folded into the programme. Forty-four of them had been at Birmingham four years earlier. The team was less than half the size of the one sent to Birmingham in 2022.
Run the numbers and Glasgow becomes the most productive Commonwealth Games team New Zealand has sent in decades. Thirty-six medals from 114 athletes works out at roughly one medal for every three people on the plane. At Birmingham in 2022, a team of 233 athletes across 19 sports won 49 medals, or about one for every five athletes. At the Gold Coast in 2018, 251 athletes across 17 sports came home with 46 medals, closer to one for every five and a half. On raw totals Glasgow looks like a step backwards. On return per athlete it is the best of the three by a clear margin.
There is an obvious caveat. A smaller programme does not just cut the number of medals available, it also cuts the number of athletes who were only ever going to be making up numbers. Sports where New Zealand rarely troubles the podium were among those dropped, and the selectors had fewer places to fill and could be choosier about who filled them. A tighter team will almost always look more efficient. Even allowing for that, the sports New Zealand did send performed close to the top of their range.
Cycling and athletics again did much of the heavy lifting. Devon Briggs won gold in record time on the track. Emma Foy and Jessie Hodges took the gold tally to eight late in the week. Eliza McCartney finally won the Commonwealth title that had eluded her for a decade, clearing 4.65m at Scotstoun Stadium to beat Olympic champion Nina Kennedy on countback, with Imogen Ayris taking bronze in the same event. In the pool, Erika Fairweather and Lewis Clareburt opened New Zealand’s account with silvers on the first night of finals, Fairweather in the 400m freestyle and Clareburt in the 200m individual medley.
The netball gold carried more weight than the medal itself. The Silver Ferns had not won a Commonwealth title since Delhi in 2010, and they won this one during a period of open uncertainty about the future of the domestic game. Captain Karin Burger told Newsroom the win was bigger than the squad. “The way netball’s been going over the last year for this group – and looking at what the future of netball in New Zealand looks like – this win wasn’t just for us. It was for the future of the sport and for females in netball – and the males coming through as well,” she said.
Chef de mission Nigel Avery, who also led the Birmingham and Paris campaigns, had said before the Games that he was not working to a medal number and that the goal was for every athlete in the team to perform to their own level. On that measure the campaign reads well regardless of where New Zealand landed on the table.
Glasgow only happened at all because the Australian state of Victoria pulled out of hosting in 2023 and the Scottish city stepped in with a stripped back model to keep the event alive. Whether that model becomes the template or was a one off rescue job is now the live question for the Commonwealth Games movement. For New Zealand, the smaller version produced fewer medals, a much smaller team and, on the numbers, a better strike rate than either of the two bigger Games before it.
You can see the full breakdown of who won what in RNZ’s medal tally and in the NZ Herald’s closing day recap. Newswire covered both final day golds, the Silver Ferns win over Jamaica and Sydnee Andrews in the judo.
Was a smaller, sharper Commonwealth Games team the right call, or does New Zealand lose something when fewer athletes get the chance to go? Tell us what you think 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 🙂
Leave a Reply