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.

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........

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