2006 Commonwealth Games
multi-sport event in Melbourne, Australia
The 2006 Commonwealth Games, officially the XVIII Commonwealth Games and commonly known as Melbourne 2006, were an international multi-sport event for members of the Commonwealth held in Melbourne, Australia between 15 and 26 March 2006. It was the fourth time Australia had hosted the Commonwealth Games. It was also the largest sporting event to be staged in Melbourne, eclipsing the 1956 Summer Olympics in terms of the number of teams and athletes competing, and events being held.
More than 4,000 athletes from 71 Commonwealth Games Associations took part in the event. Zimbabwe withdrew its membership from the Commonwealth of Nations and Commonwealth Games Federation on 8 December 2003 and so did not participate in the event. With 245 sets of medals, the Games featured 17 Commonwealth sports. These sporting events took place at 13 venues in the host city, two venues in Bendigo and one venue each in Ballarat, Geelong, Lysterfield Park and Traralgon.
The site for the opening and closing ceremonies was the Melbourne Cricket Ground, which was also used during the 1956 Olympics. The mascot for the games was Karak, a red-tailed black cockatoo (a threatened species). The official song of the Games, "Together We Are One", was composed by the ARIA awardee Australian recording artist Delta Goodrem.
The public source identifies “2006 Commonwealth Games” as multi-sport event in Melbourne, Australia. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Commonwealth, Games and multi-sport.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q659207. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2006, 1956 and 2003.
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This entry incorporates text from “2006 Commonwealth Games” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.