Scot­land con­ceived rug­by sev­ens in the 1880s yet it will not fea­ture in the scaled-back 2026 Com­mon­wealth Games host­ed by Glas­gow.

Oth­er sports that have al­so been dropped in­clude field hock­ey, triathlon, bad­minton, Twen­ty20 crick­et, squash, and div­ing.

The Games will have a 10-sport pro­gram in four venues. Ath­let­ics and swim­ming are com­pul­so­ry while there will al­so be track cy­cling, gym­nas­tics, net­ball, weightlift­ing, box­ing, ju­do, bowls and 3x3 bas­ket­ball.

There will al­so be in­te­grat­ed para events in six of those sports: Ath­let­ics, swim­ming, track cy­cling, weightlift­ing, bowls and bas­ket­ball.

The Games will take place from Ju­ly 23-Aug. 2 af­ter Glas­gow stepped in when the Aus­tralian state of Vic­to­ria with­drew last year be­cause of ris­ing costs.

It was not easy to de­cide which sports to in­clude, Com­mon­wealth Games Scot­land chair­man Ian Reid told the BBC on Tues­day.

“I think every­body recog­nis­es that these events need to be more af­ford­able, lighter and we would have loved to have all of our sports and all of our ath­letes com­pet­ing but un­for­tu­nate­ly it’s just not de­liv­er­able or af­ford­able for this time frame,” Reid said.

Re­lat­ed Sto­ries

Ath­letes and sup­port staff will be housed in ho­tels. Around 3,000 ath­letes are ex­pect­ed to com­pete from up to 74 Com­mon­wealth na­tions and ter­ri­to­ries rep­re­sent­ing a com­bined to­tal of 2.5 bil­lion peo­ple, a third of the world’s en­tire pop­u­la­tion.

More than 500,000 tick­ets made avail­able for spec­ta­tors.

The Com­mon­wealth Games Fed­er­a­tion chief ex­ec­u­tive Katie Sadleir said: “The 2026 Games will be a bridge to the Com­mon­wealth Games of to­mor­row, an ex­cit­ing first step in our jour­ney to re­set and re­de­fine the Games as a tru­ly col­lab­o­ra­tive, flex­i­ble and sus­tain­able mod­el for the fu­ture that min­imis­es costs, re­duces the en­vi­ron­men­tal foot­print, and en­hances so­cial im­pact. In do­ing so, in­creas­ing the scope of coun­tries ca­pa­ble of host­ing.”

Glas­gow host­ed the event in 2014 at a cost of more than 540 mil­lion pounds.

GLAS­GOW, Scot­land (AP) —