Glasgow Has Scrapped the 1,500m. The Commonwealth Mile Returns Saturday After 60 Years.

Glasgow 2026 has taken the 1,500m off its athletics program and replaced it with the mile, and the man who broke the mile world record nine days ago will run it for the host nation.

The mile is a replacement rather than an addition. The metric 1,500m, on the Commonwealth program since 1970, does not appear at Glasgow at all, which leaves the mile as the only middle-distance event between the 800m and the 5,000m. Heats are Wednesday morning at Scotstoun Stadium and the final closes the athletics program Saturday evening.

Josh Kerr arrives holding the record. He ran 3:42.66 in the Emsley Carr Mile at the London Diamond League on July 18, taking 0.47 seconds off Hicham El Guerrouj’s 3:43.13 from Rome in 1999, a mark that had lasted 27 years. Yared Nuguse was second in 3:45.69, more than three seconds behind. World Athletics reported that Kerr had gone into the race calling the attempt Project 222, after the number of seconds he wanted.

Scotland has entered a full complement of three in the men’s race. Kerr runs alongside Jake Wightman, who was pre-selected last year and is competing at his fourth Commonwealth Games, and Neil Gourley. In the women’s mile, Jemma Reekie lines up with Erin Wallace and Sarah Calvert. Laura Muir, at her third Commonwealth Games, is not in the mile field. With the 1,500m gone, Team Scotland has entered her in the 5,000m. The 39-strong athletics squad named in June also includes Eilish McColgan in the 10,000m.

The most direct threat to Kerr is 20 years old. Australia’s Cameron Myers won the Bowerman Mile at the Prefontaine Classic on July 4 in 3:46.06, an Australian and Oceanian record, holding off Nuguse in 3:46.61 and Ethan Strand in 3:46.97 for his first Diamond League title.

The last Commonwealth mile was run at Independence Park in Kingston, Jamaica, on Aug. 13, 1966, and Kip Keino won it. It was the final time the imperial distance appeared on the program. The most famous edition had come 12 years earlier in Vancouver, where Roger Bannister beat John Landy in 3:58.8, the first race in which two men ran under four minutes. The Games converted to metric units at the next edition after Kingston, in Edinburgh in 1970, which means the mile was retired in Scotland and is being restored in Scotland 56 years later. Kingston had no women’s mile, and no Commonwealth Games has ever staged one, so whoever wins Saturday will be the first women’s champion over the distance in the history of the Games.

The reintroduction came from World Athletics president Sebastian Coe, who proposed it for Victoria 2026 before that host city withdrew, after which World Athletics and the Commonwealth Games Federation carried the event into the Glasgow program. “The One Mile is the quintessential Commonwealth athletics event whose return to the Games in Glasgow 2026 I very much welcome,” Coe said in a statement published by the organizers. “From 1930 through to 1966, the Mile was the blue riband event of each Games.”

The mile is the only non-metric distance World Athletics recognizes for world records and rankings. At Glasgow it is also the only middle-distance final on offer, and out-of-stadium events have been cut from the program entirely, so there is no marathon, an event that had appeared at every Commonwealth Games since 1930. Kerr, Wightman and Gourley run their heats Wednesday morning at Scotstoun, in the session that opens at 10 a.m.