Dozens of our top athletes are coming home with hard-fought-for medals from a Commonwealth Games that nearly didn’t happen.
But many of our best sports people didn’t even attend after Glasgow slashed the number of sports from 20 to 10, in what some say could be a template for future games.
“Host cities can’t afford to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on building new facilities for a 10-day sporting event,” veteran sports commentator Brendan Telfer says.
Once second only to the Olympics as a multi-sport event, the so-called ‘Friendly Games’ has lost some of its stature, he says. And future smaller events could be to the detriment of Kiwi athletes.
“It’s particularly tough on us in New Zealand. You think of the sports that have been cut from this year’s Commonwealth Games – no sevens, men or women; no squash, men or women; no hockey, men or women; no triathlon, men or women.
“These are all sports where we win a lot of medals traditionally at the Commonwealth Games because our leading competitors in these sports are world-class competitors.
“But our rugby sevens are sitting at home watching it on television.
“We’ve got Paul Cole, the world’s number one squash player, and we’ve got strong women as well in that sport and they’re missing out.”
At a cost of NZ$400 million, Glasgow was put on at a fraction of the price of previous games, and was an event that Telfer calls a qualified success. Victoria pulled out when the forecast budget blew out to $7 billion, which included a roading network linking Melbourne to towns around the state, says Telfer.
The Gold Coast briefly offered to co-host but also withdrew for cost reasons.
In August 2024, Glasgow came to the rescue.
“The Glaswegians took this really brutal, kind of ruthless approach to these games. They ditched 10 sports and they came out with this great line which will probably linger forever in the history of the Commonwealth Games: “We’ll do it, we’ll make it small, and we’ll do it our way. We’ll do it as long as it costs us nothing.” And they basically absolutely stuck to that principle,” Telfer says.
Telfer has covered 10 Commonwealth Games and about the same number of Olympics. He picks Zoe Hobbs’ 100m sprint gold as the most memorable moment of Glasgow.
“It was terrible conditions, she had the worst possible lane – lane seven – and it was pouring with rain, and I thought, this is just a raffle,” he says.
“After about the 50-metre mark I thought, ‘Oh this is where the Brits and the Aussies and the Jamaicans will come through and bowl her’, but they didn’t.”
Telfer also points out to The Detail that several top Jamaican sprinters didn’t turn up for the glamour event of the Games because there is much less money in it than other major international events.
“They are about to start competing in what is called the Diamond League track and field meetings at various capitals around Europe for the next couple of months and the promoters pay huge money if you’ve got a ranking.
“I’m pleased to think that Zoe will be now in demand by track and field promoters for what she’s done in Glasgow but it’s an example of where unfortunately the Commonwealth Games have lost some of its glamour, not all of it, but a lot of the athletes now compete for the Olympic Games, World Championships and the Diamond League meetings.”
In total, 3000 athletes from 74 countries competed in 10 sports, at seven venues. Despite the reduced sports, Glasgow holds the record as having the largest number of para sports events in the games’ history.
Glasgow-based journalist Leonard Powell says the para lawn bowls finals will stay with him as the event that sums up the games as successful and inspirational.
“You know, if you just read it on paper, para bowls, mid-week in the morning, you wouldn’t expect many people to be there.
But there was a “huge crowd of Scottish fans, English fans giving it to each other. Scotland won in the tie break.”
“That was one of the most breathtaking moments that I just didn’t expect.”
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