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Gulveer Singh does not panic. On Tuesday evening at Scotstoun Stadium, rain fell hard enough to suspend the women’s high jump and strip a few runners of their shoes. It gave him every excuse. He took none of them. The 27-year-old Naib Subedar from Uttar Pradesh became the first Indian man to win a Commonwealth Games medal in the men’s 10,000m, clocking 27:49.79s, his fifth-fastest time ever over the distance, less than a second behind Australia’s Ky Robinson. David Mullarkey of the Isle of Man took bronze in 27:50.28s. For the first time in the event’s Commonwealth Games history, no African runner stood on the podium. CWG Day 5 Highlights
There’s an old truism about distance running: hang in, last out, break in the end. Gulveer had heard it before. A year ago, he failed to live it.
At last year’s World Championships in Tokyo, in his debut on that stage, Gulveer had done what most in his event do for 4,800m: sit with the pack, drift wide when the gaps opened, wait for the kick. The kick never came. He finished ninth in his heat, missing the 5,000m final, well short of what training had promised.
Glasgow was different, though the pattern looked similar for a long time, and that was rather the point.
Gulveer went out fast, sitting second at the 400m mark, and held his place among the leaders through 4,000m. Then the race, and the weather, began to bite. He slid to ninth by 5,500m. Where panic might have set in, none did. He held the inner line, conserved what he had, and waited.
Between 5,600m and 6,000m, he moved through the field from ninth to fifth. It was not a decisive move, not yet. It was a man giving himself an option. He dropped back to ninth again by 6,800m, climbed to fifth by 7,000m, with Kenyans and Ugandans still ahead of him and Robinson in the mix. By the final kilometre, he was fourth. You could see, if you were watching for it, that he was setting up for one more push.
The bell rang with Gulveer in third, a medal all but secured. But medals slip away without the final kick, and he had learnt that the hard way. So he pushed, moving past Kenya’s Edwin Kurgat and closing in on Robinson before the line arrived. He missed gold by less than a second.
“My only strategy was to win a medal,” Gulveer said afterwards.
“My coach told me not to do anything special in the first part of the race. For about the first 400 metres, I was told to stay behind the leaders and follow them. My coach believes my finishing speed is very good, so the plan was to stay with the pack and make my move at the end. That strategy worked.”
RECORD-BREAKING GULVEER CONTINUES DREAM RUN
He was characteristically unsentimental about what the medal meant to him personally. “It feels good. The full feeling will probably sink in later, but right now I am happy because I have won a medal for the country. Personal achievements come later. We compete on this platform for India, so this medal is for the country.”
It is worth pausing on how ordinary that answer will sound to some, and how it undersells a year that has been anything but.
2026 has been Gulveer’s finest yet. He broke the national half marathon record in New York in March. Around the same time, in the United States, he ran a personal best of 27:24.18s over 10,000m. In May, in Los Angeles, he produced his fastest 5,000m. Behind these numbers sits a decision made some time ago to relocate to the high-altitude training base in Colorado Springs, where he now trains under the American coach Scott Simmons. Glasgow, in that sense, was less a surprise than a confirmation.
Gulveer’s rise did not begin in Colorado, of course.
Born in Sirsa village in Aligarh district, he grew up running village roads and farmland trails, training initially for recruitment into the Army. He joined the Grenadiers Regiment in 2018, and the rest has been a fairly relentless accumulation of firsts. A 5,000m bronze at the 2023 Asian Championships. A 10,000m bronze at the 2022 Asian Games. Double gold in both events at last year’s Asian Championships in Gumi, which made him the continent’s leading distance runner.
He holds the national records in the 5,000m, 10,000m, the mile and the half marathon, and in 2025 became the first Indian to run a sub-four-minute mile and the first to break 60 minutes for the half-marathon. Indoors, his 12:59.77s for 5,000m made him the first Asian athlete to dip under 13 minutes.
None of that, strictly, needed proving again. But Commonwealth Games medals have a way of asking old questions anyway, and on Tuesday, in weather that had runners losing their footing and their shoes, Gulveer answered his own.
Kavita Raut remains the only other Indian to have medalled in the 10,000m at these Games, a bronze at Delhi 2010. Gulveer is now the first Indian man to do it, and the manner of it, patient, then ruthless, suggests he intends this not to be the last.
– Ends
