World At Net · Sports · Global Affairs
Glasgow Opens the XXIII Commonwealth Games as the Hydro Hosts a Ceremony Unlike Any Before It
Scotland welcomes more than three thousand athletes from seventy four nations and territories in the first indoor opening ceremony in the history of the Games.
Glasgow returned to the Commonwealth Games stage on Thursday, 23 July, opening the XXIII edition of the Games with a ceremony held for the first time entirely inside an arena. The OVO Hydro, a venue better known for hosting the world's biggest music acts, became the setting for a night that organisers describe as a Clyde built experience for the world, built around the sound and spirit of Scotland rather than the scale of a stadium.
The choice of an indoor arena marks a genuine break from Commonwealth Games tradition. Every previous opening ceremony, from the first Empire Games in Hamilton in 1930 through Birmingham in 2022, unfolded beneath open sky in a stadium built for track and field. Glasgow's organisers, working under ceremonies chief Louisa Mahon with Roxana Cole as show and staging director, chose instead to bring the audience close, filling the Hydro with music, dance and performance rather than pageantry on a stadium scale.
More than six hundred volunteers took part in the production, alongside a line up of Scottish musical talent that reads like a homecoming. KT Tunstall headlined the evening, joined by Callum Beattie, Nina Nesbitt, Nathan Evans and Saint PHNX, Tom Walker and the electronic folk duo Valtos, who provided the sound for the Parade of Nations. Fresh from a summer of attention at the FIFA World Cup, Evans and Saint PHNX brought a version of the anthem that made them familiar to a global audience back to a home crowd.
The Parade of Nations carried its own symbolism. Athletes from all seventy four Commonwealth Games Associations entered behind individually designed King's Batons, each one customised to represent the culture of its nation and reunited at the Hydro following the conclusion of the King's Baton Relay. King Charles III and Queen Camilla were expected to attend, with the King set to formally declare the Games open, a role his father once held as Prince of Wales at the Birmingham ceremony four years earlier.
Finnie, a unicorn and the official mascot of Glasgow 2026, appeared throughout the evening, a nod to Scotland's national animal and a lighter counterpoint to a ceremony otherwise built around music and memory. The Games themselves will run through 2 August, staged across four venues in Glasgow: the Scottish Event Campus, Scotstoun Stadium, Tollcross International Swimming Centre and the Hydro itself. More than three thousand athletes will contest two hundred and fifteen gold medals across ten sports and six Para sports, with medal competition beginning the day after the ceremony and bowls events starting even earlier on the Thursday.
For Scotland, the return of the Games carries particular weight. Glasgow previously hosted in 2014, and Scotland remains one of only six nations, alongside Australia, Canada, England, New Zealand and Wales, to have competed at every edition since 1930. The 2026 Games arrive after a difficult path to the starting line: an earlier host bid from Victoria, Australia, was cancelled by the state government in 2023, leaving Glasgow to step in and rebuild a Games it had already proven it could deliver.
Broadcast coverage in the United Kingdom falls to TNT Sports as the domestic rights holder, with free to air highlights, including the opening ceremony itself, shown by Channel 5 and presented by former Olympic sprinter Jeanette Kwakye. BBC Alba will carry the ceremony with Gaelic language commentary, extending the reach of a night organisers have pitched as belonging as much to Scotland's culture as to its athletes.
What the Hydro offered on Thursday was, by design, an intimate account of a small nation's outsized role in Commonwealth sport, a ceremony that traded the scale of a stadium for the immediacy of an arena and bet that the songs of Glasgow would carry the moment as well as any fireworks could. Over the following ten days, the story shifts from ceremony to competition, and to whether a Games staged on a leaner footprint than its predecessors can still deliver the moments that have defined the event for nearly a century.
Shahzad Ashraf Butt
World At Net · Sports · 23 July 2026
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