Commonwealth Games History, Winners, Anthem and Medal Tally

From a Canadian sports editor's idea at the 1928 Olympics to the Glasgow 2026 stadium, how the Friendly Games built its traditions, its music and its medal count.

Every four years a stadium fills with anthems from more than seventy nations and territories, and almost nobody in the crowd knows that the entire event exists because a Canadian newspaperman got tired of arguing about amateur rules at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics. The Commonwealth Games has spent nearly a century quietly rewriting its own identity, changing its name four times, losing entire sports and gaining others, and building a medal tradition that now runs into tens of thousands of individual performances. This piece pulls apart that history, the story behind the anthem tradition each nation carries into the arena, the complete medal tally since 1930, and the parts of the story that rarely make it into a quick search result.

The origin story nobody quotes correctly

The idea usually gets credited to a single person, but it actually took nearly forty years and two failed attempts before it became a real event. An Australian clergyman named Ashley Cooper first floated the idea of a Pan Britannic sporting festival in 1891, hoping it would foster goodwill across the British Empire the way modern trade blocs try to build cohesion through shared institutions today. Nothing came of it. In 1911, London staged a Festival of Empire to mark the coronation of King George V, and a small sporting competition called the Inter Empire Championships ran alongside it. That, too, faded.

The real push came from Melville Marks Robinson, a Hamilton sports editor everyone called Bobby. At the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics he was doubling as Canada's team manager and as a newspaper reporter, and he grew frustrated with how rigidly amateur regulations were being enforced at the Olympics. He gathered counterparts from Australia, Great Britain, South Africa and New Zealand at that same Olympics and pitched an alternative built on friendliness rather than pure rivalry. His proposal described a competition that would be merrier and less stern, substituting the pleasure of a new adventure for the pressure of international rivalry.

Two years later, in August 1930, the first British Empire Games opened in Hamilton, Ontario. Eleven teams and roughly 400 athletes competed in six sports, athletics, swimming, rowing, boxing, wrestling and lawn bowls. The city of Hamilton put up 30,000 dollars to help cover the travel costs of visiting nations, a subsidy that would be unthinkable for a host city today given how expensive multi sport events have become. Women were allowed to compete, but only in swimming.

Four names, one Games

Few major sporting events have changed their own name as often as this one. Understanding the name changes is also useful background for anyone trying to make sense of old newspaper clippings or archival medal tables, since the same competition appears under different titles depending on the decade.

Only six nations have attended every single edition regardless of the name on the letterhead, Australia, Canada, England, New Zealand, Scotland and Wales. That six country streak is longer than the Commonwealth itself has existed in its current legal form, since several of those teams competed as Empire nations well before modern Commonwealth membership rules were settled.

The anthem tradition, and the song that almost was

Unlike the Olympics, the Commonwealth Games has never had one single global anthem played for every winner. Instead, each competing nation or territory brings its own victory anthem to the podium, and the story of how several of those anthems were chosen is far stranger than most fans realise.

England did not always use Jerusalem. For decades English gold medallists heard Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March, popularly known as Land of Hope and Glory. It was only after a poll conducted by the Commonwealth Games Council for England ahead of the 2010 Delhi Games that Jerusalem was formally adopted as the new English victory anthem, a choice later reinforced in 2010 with a fresh orchestral arrangement featuring British Got Talent winner Tokio Myers and athlete Jazmin Sawyers recorded at Abbey Road Studios.

Scotland's journey is even more layered. Scots Wha Hae served as the team's anthem from the very first Games in 1930 until 1958, when it was replaced by Scotland the Brave. That version lasted until the 2010 Games, when Flower of Scotland took over after Scottish athletes selected among four shortlisted options in January 2010, alongside Loch Lomond and Highland Cathedral.

The song is about celebrating the cultural diversity of the host city. Whether it is an orchestral rework of a nineteenth century hymn or a reggae anthem written specifically for the occasion, each host nation has used its Games song to say something about who they are, not just to fill three minutes at a medal ceremony.

Host cities have also written original theme songs that never became permanent anthems but left a mark locally. Ahead of the 1974 Christchurch Games, a nationwide postal vote decided between two competing entries, Oh What a Day and Join Together, with the latter winning by a narrow margin in the final week even though the losing song was still played by the New Zealand Army Band during the opening ceremony march past. Birmingham 2022 commissioned Champion from UB40, a band formed in the same city, deliberately choosing a group whose identity was inseparable from the host city itself.

The all time medal tally since 1930

Ninety six years of competition have produced a medal table with a few permanent fixtures at the top and a long tail of nations still chasing their first ever medal of any colour. The figures below reflect the cumulative count through the 2022 Birmingham Games, the last fully completed edition before the ongoing 2026 Glasgow Games.

Australia and England are the only two nations to have crossed 2000 total medals, and Australia has finished top of the table at every Games since 1990 with a single exception, the 2014 Glasgow edition, when host nation England topped the standings instead. India sits fourth overall, ahead of New Zealand, despite a lower total medal count, purely because India has accumulated more gold medals, a reminder that the official Commonwealth Games ranking system always weighs gold above total medal volume.

Sixty three Commonwealth Games Associations have won at least one medal across history, and forty nine of those have managed at least one gold. On the other end of the table, more than a dozen current Commonwealth members, including Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Belize, Brunei and the Maldives, have never won a Commonwealth Games medal of any colour.

India's Commonwealth Games record

India first appeared at the Games in 1934 and has built one of the more interesting medal stories in the competition's history, marked by long droughts followed by sudden breakthroughs. India failed to win a single medal in 1954, then slowly built momentum through the 1980s and 1990s before a genuine surge from 2002 onward.

The high point remains the 2010 Delhi Games, the only edition India has ever hosted. India finished second on the table with 101 medals, including 38 gold, becoming the first time the country crossed the 100 medal mark at a single Games. That home edition also produced several firsts. Ashish Kumar became the first Indian gymnast to win a Commonwealth Games medal, taking silver and bronze. Krishna Poonia ended a 52 year wait for an Indian athletics gold by winning the women's discus throw. Geeta Phogat became the first Indian woman wrestler to win Commonwealth Games gold, in the 55 kilogram category, a result now widely seen as a turning point for women's wrestling in the country.

Why Glasgow 2026 looks different, and why Ahmedabad 2030 matters

The 2026 Games, running from 23 July to 2 August in Glasgow, exist at all only because of a last minute rescue. The Australian state of Victoria was originally awarded the 2026 Games in 2022, but withdrew in July 2023 after cost projections spiralled far beyond the original budget. Scotland stepped in to host instead, on the condition that the event be scaled down sharply, with only ten sports staged across four venues and an explicit commitment that no additional public funds would be required beyond what had already been allocated.

That scaling down explains a genuine wave of frustration among fans and athletes in several countries, particularly India, where cricket, hockey, badminton, wrestling and shooting, five of the country's strongest medal generating sports, were all dropped from the 2026 programme. For a nation whose medal tally has historically leaned heavily on shooting and wrestling, a stripped down sports list changes the entire medal equation for this edition.

This will be the first Commonwealth Games held since the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the accession of King Charles III as Head of the Commonwealth, and the first staged under the Commonwealth Sport presidency of Donald Rukare.

There is a clear silver lining on the horizon. In November 2025, delegates from 74 Commonwealth nations approved India's bid to host the Centenary edition in Ahmedabad in 2030, marking the return of the Games to India two decades after Delhi 2010 and coinciding with the hundredth anniversary of the very first Hamilton Games in 1930. Early reporting suggests the Ahmedabad programme could restore up to 17 sports, with cricket and shooting tipped to return, which would be a meaningful reversal for countries that lost their strongest events for 2026.

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