India, Aug. 4 -- A late surge over the final three days left a strong imprint on India's campaign at the 2026 Commonwealth Games, as they secured a fourth-place finish with 13 gold medals and 39 overall. Glasgow hosted an emergency, scaled-down edition comprising just ten sports, almost half the programme seen in Birmingham four years earlier. Several of India's traditional medal-winning disciplines, including Wrestling, Badminton and Table Tennis, were absent, while Shooting had already been dropped in 2022.

The reduced programme made India's eventual performance more credible than it initially appears. Birmingham 2022 had already shown India could remain among the leading nations despite the exclusion of Shooting, one of its strongest ...