Source: The Conversation – Canada
With the 2026 Commonwealth Games underway in Glasgow, Scotland, until Aug. 2, more than 3,000 athletes from 74 Commonwealth nations and territories are competing across a 10-sport program.
Canada has sent a team of more than 150 athletes across nine sports and has already featured prominently in the medal standings, winning 27 medals, including nine gold.
The Commonwealth Games remain the only major international multi-sport event where para sport medals are fully integrated into the main sporting program, not counted separately.
On the surface, this integration looks like real progress. But as Canada’s Future of Sport report has highlighted, there are persistent inequities across the sport system, including uneven access to participation and high-performance pathways for many athletes with disabilities.
Across much of the Commonwealth, particularly in lower- and middle-income member states, the barriers to participating in para sport remain vast, reflecting disparities in accessibility, attitudes toward disability, funding, facilities, equipment and coaching. These inequalities are cummulative: restricted access to coaching, classification or competition at one stage can prevent an athlete from ever reaching the next.
Who gets included?
The Commonwealth Games are often celebrated as the global leader in integrated para sport, and rightly so. But my own research suggests that integration alone does not guarantee inclusion. It’s possible to integrate para-sport into an event while leaving the structures determining access to that event largely unchanged.
In examining the evolution of para sport at the Commonwealth Games, my colleagues and I have found that decisions about which sports and classification categories are included can themselves reproduce inequality. Classification is designed to ensure fair competition, but it also determines who gets the opportunity to compete at all. It therefore operates not only as a technical process, but as a further gateway to recognition, funding and international participation.
It remains unclear how decisions are formally made about which classifications get included in the event. Glasgow 2026 made a commitment to increase the para sport program, making it the largest to date. But the systems upon which decisions are made are based on non-disabled perspectives, reflecting a form of institutional ableism.
This matters because athletes whose classifications are excluded do not miss just one competition; they may also lose access to the visibility, recognition and future investment that participation can generate.
Athletes in classifications with minimal functional impairment are often considered more commercially “palatable” for broadcast and sponsorship. Likewise, sports that require relatively little infrastructure are more likely to flourish internationally than those demanding expensive facilities or specialist equipment. Access is still gated by resources.
Building opportunity through GAPS
The gap in access to para sport between wealthier and developing Commonwealth nations is widening. One response to that challenge is a program called GAPS: Gather, Adjust, Prepare, Sustain.
Established by Commonwealth Sport, it aims to strengthen para sport systems by supporting athlete preparation, coach education, classification opportunities and international competition experience.
The program has become a cornerstone of support for para athletes from developing Commonwealth countries. Its camps create space for training, learning and community-building for athletes who often lack the infrastructure taken for granted elsewhere.
As researchers who study disability sport and have been involved in supporting GAPS through research on sport governance and access to classification opportunities, we have seen first-hand the need for such a development program.
Most recently, 54 para athletes and coaches from 15 Commonwealth nations attended a weeklong GAPS preparation camp in Ayr, Scotland, before travelling to Glasgow for the Games.
The need for programs like GAPS is reflected in the medal data. At the 2018 Commonwealth Games, Canada, England and Australia made up 54 per cent of the para athletes competing. Although the 2022 Games saw more GAPS-supported athletes qualify and several reach the podium, medal success remains concentrated among the Commonwealth’s wealthiest sporting nations.
Many of the stories behind the 54 athletes who attended the Ayr camp are remarkable, and often difficult. Many of the athletes acquired their disabilities through childhood polio. Others have pursued elite sport amid conflict, poverty or limited access to rehabilitation services and sporting infrastructure.
Programs like GAPS offer a glimpse of what it might look like to actually redistribute opportunity rather than simply showcase it. For the duration of the camp, resources, relationship and recognition, normally concentrated within more established systems, become more widely accessible.
Why visibility isn’t enough
The visibility created by the Commonwealth Games matters. For athletes from countries where disability sport receives little recognition or investment, reaching an international stage can challenge assumptions about disability and demonstrate what is possible.
But visibility is not the same as equity. Being visible on an international stage does not mean that athletes had equal opportunities to reach it. A medal or a compelling personal story can help shift perceptions, yet it does not by itself change the conditions that shape disabled people’s lives.
Nowhere is this tension clearer than in para powerlifting, a sport that has involved many GAPS athletes and delivered the 2026 Games’ first medal.
The achievements of these athletes represent genuine progress, but competition at the Games is only one moment in a much longer journey. The more difficult test of development is what happens between camps when athletes and coaches apply their newly acquired capital within the constraints of their home systems.
After the medals are awarded and the spotlight moves elsewhere, athletes continue to depend on the training environments, coaching systems, equipment and disability infrastructure available in their home countries. The broader barriers facing disabled people in their communities, including exclusion from education, employment, transport and public life, will remain.
The program provides valuable opportunities for athletes and coaches from developing Commonwealth nations, but it also operates within a wider system of global inequality. It is supported largely by people from more resourced nations, working to help coaches and athletes from the Global South.
Unless these partnerships genuinely build local leadership and long-term capacity, development initiatives risk reproducing familiar paternalistic relationships rather than transforming them. This requires those of us from more resourced systems to work at the perimeter; listening, connecting and supporting rather than assuming another community’s needs are ours to define.
The challenge for GAPS is therefore not simply to expand its reach, but to ensure that responsibility and decision-making increasingly rest with the communities it aims to support. Its long-term success should be measured not only through qualifications and medals but through whether coaching expertise, classification pathways and competitive opportunities have taken root locally.
Until those foundations exist more equitably across the Commonwealth, integrated medal tables will tell only part of the story.
Laura Misener receives funding from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Katie Cronin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/07/28/the-commonwealth-games-celebrate-integrated-para-sport-but-they-also-expose-inequalities/