Commonwealth Games 2026, 8 Days To Go: With less than a week and only eight days to go before the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games 2026, the spectacle will look completely different from past Commonwealth Games. While in 2022 Birmingham staged games in 19 different arenas, only 10 disciplines will be on display at Glasgow 2026, which is a new low for the Commonwealth Games programme, and the number of games hasn’t been this low for more than three decades.
Before the pandemic, four Commonwealth sports- athletics, swimming, cycling, and shooting- were included. The rest have been dropped because of a lack of funds and/or interest from the athletes and countries. As it turns out, the slimmed-down version has managed to rescue the Games from a crisis, but it may have seriously knocked India’s medal count in Scotland.
Why Have The Commonwealth Games 2026 Been Reduced From 19 Sports To 10?
The drop is essentially due to financial and logistical complications in 2026. At first, Australia’s Victoria was given the organizing rights; Yet, after a couple of years, it decided to resign, as being the organizer of a major event was becoming economically too risky. Then Glasgow took on the organizer role with hardly any time to plan it at all, and the main challenge was to reduce costs and make the Commonwealth Games environmentally better.
The decision of only offering a few sports in four venues was a way of containing the cost and making the Games feasible. Officials of the Commonwealth Sport called it a way of future-proofing the event by keeping it cheap and interesting for cities willing to host it at the same time.
The 10 sports on the Glasgow 2026 programme are:
- Athletics and Para Athletics
- Swimming and Para Swimming
- Track Cycling and Para Track Cycling
- 3×3 Basketball and Wheelchair Basketball
- Boxing
- Artistic Gymnastics
- Judo
- Lawn Bowls and Para Bowls
- Netball
- Weightlifting and Para Powerlifting
Which Sports Have Been Dropped From Glasgow 2026?
Following sports from Birmingham 2022 have been dropped from the Glasgow Commonwealth Games 2026:
- Cricket
- Hockey
- Badminton
- Wrestling
- Shooting
- Table Tennis
- Squash
- Rugby Sevens
- Triathlon
- Beach Volleyball
- Diving
- Road Cycling and Mountain Biking
How Will The Reduced Sports Programme Affect India?
India is one of the countries that is probably going to feel the most pain through this new cut-down schedule. Indian athletes at Birmingham 2022 won medals in disciplines like wrestling, badminton, table tennis, hockey and even cricket, sports that won’t be on the list of sporting events in Glasgow.
India’s CWG medal tally over time has mostly been contributed to by badminton, shooting and wrestling. Without these major sporting events, some of the most significant medal chances that India had have now been wiped out before the games have even officially started.
Well-known Indian shuttlers like PV Sindhu, Lakshya Sen, Satwiksairaj Rankireddy, Chirag Shetty, along with the top players from sports like wrestling, shooting, and table tennis, will not get to represent the country in their respective games as they are not on the sports programme in the 2026 edition.
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