Please remember: do not say anything to Baron Pierre De Coubertin. The founder of the modern Olympics must not know that the Dutch committee has trampled on his fundamental principle. For the orange bureaucrats, the important thing is not to participate but to win. Thus they withdrew three of the four golfers qualified for Paris 2024.
di Sauro Legramandi
The motivation? They are too bad, they can’t win a medal or even get into the top eight.
Pedagogists and coaches can go preach in Dutch schools and youth sectors that participation in sport is important. For the Orange Committee, it is the exact opposite to the point of introducing unlikely selection criteria. Their condition for going to Paris was to arrive in the first 27 of the Olympic ranking (composed of 60 golfers). From 28th and below it was enough a top eight finish in a European Tour event featuring five of the top 50 golfers in the world rankings or ten of the top 100. Crazy stuff, beyond any logic. Today between the PGA Tour and the Arab Super League it is difficult to have a field like that, it is a situation that happens in 7-8 tournaments a year.
Moral of the story: Joost Luiten, Darius Van Driel e Dewi Weber will be free from commitments from August 1st to 4th, dates of the Olympic tournament at Le Golf National. The one who will have the full weight of Dutch golf on his shoulders will be Anne van Dam.
The strongest in the world at the Olympics this year
A total of sixty professional golfers have booked their ticket to the Olympic dream, according to a dedicated ranking. These are the two best placed golfers for each nation, a number that doubles if they are all in the top 15 in the world. The strongest players on Earth will probably be in Paris: in strict order of ranking, Scheffler (number 1, USA), McIlroy (2, Northern Ireland), Schauffele (3, USA), Aberg (4, Sweden), Clark (5, USA); Hovland (6, Norway), Morikawa (7, USA); Rahm (10, Spain).
For Italy there are Migliozzi (127), Manassero (165) and Alessandra Fanali (211).
The Dutch who were kicked out are not exactly amateur golfers. Joost Luiten is number 151 with six victories on the DP World Tour and 18 years on the Tour. In his career, the 38-year-old has played a Major 21 times (two Masters). Von Driel is ranked 248th and has only one victory in his collection: the Magical Kenya Open last February. Ironically, at the start that Thursday there were sonly two players in the top 100 in the world. Dewi Weber is the number 302 in the Rolex women’s ranking. They will all be watching compatriot Anne Van Dam (number 108 in the world) and second at the Spanish Open on the Ladies European Tour.
Joost and Darius did not hide their anger via social media. Dewi did not hold back either. “We asked the Committee if it was a question of money. If that were the case,” she said, “we would have paid. Instead, they simply told us that it is not worth sending us to the Olympics. It is a sad and painful message for anyone who has worked as hard as the three of us.”
In Japan, number 181 wins a medal
The more than well-founded complaints of the Dutch Golf Federation and the International Federation were in vain. If the cardinal principles of the sport were not enough, the insiders brought the numbers. In Japan four years ago, Rory Sabbatini (who became Slovakian specifically to participate in the Olympics) won the silver while ranked 161st in the world. Taiwanese was even further behind Pan Cheng-tsung: from 181st he won a seven-way playoff for bronze, also beating McIlroy and Morikawa. On the American PGA Tour, this season, seven events have gone to golfers ranked higher than 100th.
Barring any sensational rethinks at the Olympics, the two Dutch will be replaced by the Swiss Joel Girrbach and the Finn Tapio Pulkkanen. Weber has not yet been replaced.
