The Home Star Who Was Meant To Light Up The Commonwealth Games Just Pulled Out

There was one image the organizers of a home Commonwealth Games would have wanted above all others: Eilish McColgan, on the Scotstoun track in Glasgow, defending the 10,000m title she won four years ago. It isn’t going to happen. McColgan has withdrawn from Glasgow 2026, unable to shake the toe injury she picked up at this year’s London Marathon, and Scottish athletics loses its poster girl at the exact moment it wanted her most.

“The Clock Was Always Against Me”

The injury, a stress fracture, kept McColgan out for close to ten weeks. She’s running again, but not soon enough. “Sadly, I won’t be competing at Glasgow 2026,” the 35-year-old said. “The good news is I’m back running. The bad news is I’ve simply run out of time to get myself, and my toe, back into spikes. Having started the year stronger than ever, I know the fitness is there, but having only taken my first run outdoors a couple of weeks ago, the clock was always against me.”

Her withdrawal hits home because it’s also a bit of a family affair. McColgan won 10,000m gold at Birmingham 2022 in a Games-record 30:48.60, emulating her mother Liz McColgan and producing one of the defining images of those Games. She has since shifted toward the roads, setting a Scottish marathon record of 2:24:25 in London, which meant she was unlikely to be a genuine medal contender over 10,000m in Glasgow anyway. But the symbolism of a Scottish icon defending a title in front of a home crowd was the point, not the medal odds. “Eilish is a legend of Scottish sport,” said Team Scotland chef de mission Elinor Middlemiss, backing her decision to wait until she’s fit to compete at her best.

She Joins An Uncomfortably Long List

The harder truth for the Games is that McColgan is not an outlier. She joins a withdrawal list that has become a story in itself for a scaled-back edition already fighting to justify its relevance. On the British side alone, sprinter Dina Asher-Smith, Olympic heptathlon silver medalist Katarina Johnson-Thompson (calf), Olympic 400m silver medalist Matthew Hudson-Smith, and world indoor 400m champion Amber Anning have all pulled out, while Olympic 800m champion Keely Hodgkinson chose to skip the event entirely to prioritize next month’s European Championships in Birmingham. Beyond athletics, three-time Olympic gymnastics champion Max Whitlock withdrew with a hand injury.

The international absentee list is just as glaring. Canadian swimming superstar Summer McIntosh is favoring the Pan Pacific Championships, and three reigning global sprint stars, St Lucia’s Olympic 100m champion Julien Alfred, Jamaica’s world 100m champion Oblique Seville, and Botswana’s Olympic 200m champion Letsile Tebogo, are all missing. When a home Games sheds this many of its marquee names, the withdrawals stop looking like individual bad luck and start looking like a verdict on the event itself.

But McColgan Won’t Stop

McColgan has trained through the injury largely on a cross trainer, an approach she’s leaned on since 2011, when foot surgery left her with five screws and a metal plate and a doctor’s warning she might never run again. She’ll spend the week in Glasgow cheering on Team Scotland, some of them young athletes supported by her own Giving Back To Track charity, set up after Birmingham to fund the next generation of Scottish talent. She has called this her likely “last” Commonwealth Games, and hoped to go out defending her title. Instead, she framed the week around the athletes coming up behind her. “The Commonwealth Games will always have a really special place in my heart,” she said. Just not, this time, with her on the track.