This evening I was visiting a friend who had the live coverage of the European Athletics Championships on TV. As we watched, I couldn’t help thinking back to Glasgow 2026 and feeling disappointed all over again at just how little television coverage the Commonwealth Games received.
In Britain, the Games were available on subscription channel TNT Sports 2 and on BBC Alba, with commentary in Gaelic. Even then, the coverage seemed quite selective about which events were shown.
It was in stark contrast to the blanket coverage we see for events such as the football World Cup, the Olympic and Paralympic Games — and, indeed, previous Commonwealth Games.
And what a shame that was, because there was some fantastic sport taking place in Glasgow.
I was lucky enough to see quite a bit of the action live.
One of my discoveries was 3×3 basketball and 3×3 wheelchair basketball, which were fast and furious and completely new events for me.
Wow! What a spectacle.
The action was incredibly fast, and the accuracy of some of the players was astonishing. I was particularly impressed by the England women’s wheelchair basketball team, who at times seemed incapable of missing a basket!
They went on to win the gold medal.
I also got to see the netball, although it seemed to bear little resemblance to the game I remember playing at school! Again, the speed of play was incredible.
Una and I found ourselves sitting in the same section as the Tonga supporters, who provided almost as much entertainment as the match itself. They sang, danced and cheered throughout the entire game, creating a fabulous atmosphere.
The television crews obviously agreed because the cameras were constantly trained on them!
We also were entertained at half time with a performance from the Mop Man which then went viral on social media.
Athletics is always a must for me, and I was lucky enough to attend two sessions.
One of the highlights was seeing the heats of the men’s mile, which had recently been reintroduced to the Games.
The favourite was Scotland’s Josh Kerr, who had recently set a new world record. We watched him win his heat before he went on to take the gold medal.
There was so much happening on the track: the men’s and women’s 200m heats, women’s 400m hurdles, the para 100m and the women’s 10,000m race walk.
The winning time for the race walk was around 42 minutes.
Forty-two minutes!
I can’t even run 10k that fast!
The field events were equally fascinating. We watched the men’s discus, the women’s javelin as part of the heptathlon, and the men’s seated shot put.
The seated shot put was particularly interesting because it was such a complicated affair. Each athlete had their own individual set-up fitted to the throwing circle, along with their own highly individual technique for launching the shot.
It was another reminder of the extraordinary skill involved in para sport.
Then, on the final day, I got to watch some of the gold and bronze medal matches in the bowls and para bowls competitions.
That was particularly special because some of those athletes were the very people whose medal ceremonies I would later help deliver as part of my volunteering role.
There was something rather wonderful about watching them compete, seeing the concentration and tension of the medal matches, and then later standing behind the scenes as they received the reward for all that work.
The Games deserved better. Nothing quite compares with being there.
The noise of the crowd, the speed of the action, the supporters singing and dancing, and the tension when a medal is at stake simply can’t be fully captured through a television screen.
But television coverage matters. It allows millions of people who can’t attend in person to discover sports they may never have watched before. It introduces us to athletes we might otherwise never hear about. It showcases para sport alongside able-bodied competition and, perhaps most importantly, it might inspire someone watching at home to give a new sport a try.
That’s why I think Glasgow 2026 deserved so much better.
These were elite athletes, representing their countries and competing at the very peak of their abilities. There were extraordinary performances, wonderful personalities and some fantastic stories unfolding across the Games.
I feel incredibly fortunate that I got to witness some of them for myself.
It’s just such a shame that so much of the British public didn’t get the opportunity to see them too.
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