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India finished the Commonwealth Games 2026 in fourth place with 39 medals — 13 gold, 17 silver and nine bronze — their best performance at a Commonwealth Games outside home soil. Boxing produced a historic seven golds, Mirabai Chanu won her third consecutive CWG title and India’s para athletics campaign ended a 20-year wait for a Games podium.
India arrived in Glasgow with a reduced programme to navigate and a point to prove. They left with 39 medals, seven boxing world-beaters, an ageless weightlifting icon and a para athletics contingent that ended a 20-year wait for a Games podium. Fourth place on the final table. Their best-ever showing at a Commonwealth Games outside of home soil.
Glasgow, Scotland: The numbers required context from the first day of competition. India’s 61 medals at Birmingham 2022 — including 22 golds — had been accumulated across a programme that included wrestling, badminton, table tennis, hockey and shooting. None of those sports featured at Glasgow 2026, a truncated ten-sport programme that stripped India of the disciplines responsible for 30 of those Birmingham medals before a single athlete had stepped onto Scottish soil.
The question was not whether India would match Birmingham. It was whether India could make 39 medals — 13 gold, 17 silver and nine bronze — feel like the achievement it genuinely was. On August 2, when the closing ceremony drew the curtain on eleven days of sport at venues across the Glasgow city region, the answer was clear. This was India’s most impressive Commonwealth Games performance in terms of what was achieved relative to what was available.
Boxing: Seven Golds, a Record That May Never Be Broken
No story from Glasgow 2026 will be retold longer than the one India’s boxers wrote. Ten medals from the boxing programme — seven gold, three silver — is not just an Indian record. It is the most gold medals won by any nation in boxing at a single Commonwealth Games in the sport’s history at the event. Seven champions.
Sakshi Chaudhary won gold in the women’s 51kg. Preeti Pawar claimed the women’s 54kg title. Jaismine Lamboria took gold at women’s 57kg. Priya Ghanghas was dominant in women’s 60kg. Arundhati Choudhary won the women’s 70kg. Sachin Siwach — who had won his round of 32 and 16 bouts with authority — took the men’s 60kg gold. Ankush Panghal completed seven with the men’s 80kg title.
Jadumani Singh, Olympic medallist Lovlina Borgohain and Narender Berwal all reached their finals and settled for silver — three more medals that, in any other boxing campaign, would have been the headlines. At Glasgow, they were the footnotes to the gold rush.
The women were the story within the story. Eight of India’s 13 gold medals across all sports were won by women — a statistic the Indian Olympic Association cited in a press release headlined “Nari Shakti Powers Team India’s Golden Campaign.” The boxing women alone accounted for five gold medals. It was the unmistakable continuation of a shift in Indian sport that has been building for a decade.
Mirabai: Three from Three
In any other Indian campaign, Mirabai Chanu’s third consecutive Commonwealth Games gold would have been the headline of the entire Games. In Glasgow, it shared space with nine other gold medallists and still managed to feel singular.
She won the women’s 48kg weightlifting gold on Day 3, extending a record that began at Gold Coast 2018, continued at Birmingham 2022, and now stands as one of the most sustained periods of individual dominance in the competition’s history. She is 29 years old. The next Commonwealth Games is in 2030 in Hamilton, New Zealand. She has not said she will be there. She has not said she won’t.
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The weightlifting programme overall produced nine medals across the able-bodied and para categories — Rishikanta Singh and Muthupandi Raja took silver on the opening days, Gyaneshwari Yadav silver in the women’s 53kg, Valluri Ajaya Babu silver in the men’s 79kg, Harjinder Kaur silver and Lovepreet Singh silver in the later days. Bindyarani Devi, the 2022 silver medallist, took bronze in the women’s 58kg in a final that had been one of the most anticipated events of the Games. She was not at her best; she still stood on the podium.
Athletics: Neeraj’s Silver, Sreeshankar Lands, Gulveer Battles
India’s athletics programme was their most complicated. The absence of relay squads and some track depth left the programme dependent on its individual stars — and those stars delivered intermittently but meaningfully.
Neeraj Chopra won silver in the men’s javelin throw, his standard good enough for gold in most editions of the Games but not on a night when South Africa’s Arshad Nadeem threw a personal best to claim gold. Sreeshankar won silver in the men’s long jump, extending his remarkable record of Commonwealth Games podiums to three appearances, three medals. Praveen Chithravel took silver in men’s triple jump.
Gulveer Singh’s silver in the men’s 10,000m was arguably the most emotionally resonant individual athletics performance of the Games — the long-distance runner who had broken India’s national record in January ran the race of his life in Glasgow and was overtaken in the final straight, the margin between gold and silver measured in footsteps.
In the field events, Sarvesh Kushare took silver in men’s high jump. On the track, Tejaswin Shankar, Yash Vir Singh and Selva Prabhu added bronze medals across the decathlon, 200m and 4x400m relay field events respectively, with Seema Kaliramna taking bronze in women’s discus.
Para Athletics: The Campaign India Had Been Waiting For
The most statistically remarkable achievement of the Glasgow Games did not come from boxing or weightlifting or athletics. It came from a para athletics programme that ended a 20-year wait for an Indian podium finish and delivered seven para medals — three gold, two silver, two bronze — to match the combined total from every previous Commonwealth Games edition in Indian para history combined.
Sharmila Dhankar won gold in the women’s shot put F57, becoming India’s first-ever Commonwealth Games gold medallist in para athletics. Dilip Gavit took gold in para sprints. Soman Rana claimed a third gold for the para athletics programme. Mohammed Basil and Shubham Juyal added silvers. Shilpa K. Shyla and Selva Prabhu contributed bronzes. Three double podium finishes across two events — men’s 100m T47 and the men’s and women’s shot put F57 — underlined the depth rather than the breadth of India’s para athletics achievement.
Jhandu Kumar’s bronze in para powerlifting completed the para tally.
Judo: Two Golds from Nowhere
Asmita Dey and Harsh Singh won gold in their respective judo categories — two golds that had not been widely anticipated in the pre-Games medal projections and represented exactly the kind of overperformance that defines a genuinely successful multi-sport campaign.
The Final Table
India finished fourth, behind Australia, Canada and New Zealand. They finished above hosts Scotland on silver medal count — the two nations level on gold and total medals, India’s advantage in silvers (17 to Scotland’s 15) the deciding factor in the standings. 122 Indian athletes competed across eight able-bodied sports and five integrated para sports. Thirteen of them stood on the top step of the podium.
The context matters. In sports they competed in, India were fourth. In boxing, they were first by a margin no other nation came close to. In para athletics, they produced a campaign that will redefine how India approaches para sport at the Commonwealth Games for the next decade. And in Mirabai Chanu, they have an athlete who shows up at Commonwealth Games and wins gold as a matter of settled routine.
Glasgow gave them a reduced stage. India made the most of what was on it.
India’s final medal tally — CWG 2026: Gold: 13 | Silver: 17 | Bronze: 9 | Total: 39 | Position: 4th
Gold medals by sport: Boxing: 7 (Chaudhary, Pawar, Lamboria, Ghanghas, Arundhati Choudhary, Siwach, Panghal) | Weightlifting: 1 (Mirabai Chanu) | Para athletics: 3 (Dhankar, Gavit, Rana) | Judo: 2 (Dey, H. Singh)
Notable stats:
- Most boxing golds by any nation at a single Commonwealth Games: 7
- India’s best-ever para athletics Commonwealth Games campaign: 7 medals
- 8 of 13 gold medals won by women athletes
- 122 athletes competed across 13 sports/para sports disciplines
- Games duration: July 23 – August 2, 2026, Glasgow, Scotland
