How the return of golf chips away at the Olympic ideal

Margaret Abbott was just 22 when she travelled from Chicago to Paris in 1899 along with her mother, literary editor and novelist Mary Perkins Ives Abbott.

She was making the trip to study art but ended up making history.

Whilst there, the 5’11” socialite won a golf tournament. It consisted of just nine holes and 10 competitors and, somehow, a round of 47 proved good enough to secure first place. She managed it, she told relatives later: “Because all the French girls apparently misunderstood the nature of the game scheduled for the day and turned up to play in high heels and tight skirts.” Her mother, incidentally, finished seventh.

Margaret Abbott died 55 years later and never knew she was an Olympic gold medallist or the first US woman to claim that particular honour. The 1900 Games in Paris were so poorly organised that many of the athletes left the French capital, like Abbott, thinking they had simply performed in another run-of-the-mill meet or match. It was only after her death that records confirmed the nature of her achievement.

The Games were littered with similar strange tales in those early years and golf provided its fair share. In 1904, a Canadian gentleman called George Lyon won gold in the men’s golf tournament despite the fact he had never picked up a club until age 38 and, when he did, he swung it much in the same way WG Grace would a cricket bat.

Golf lost its place at the Games after that but it will emerge from the Olympic wilderness in four years’ time when a purpose-built course at Reserva de Marapendi in Barra da Tijuca, just outside Rio de Janeiro, plays host to some of the world’s finest golfers.

Some, it must be stressed, but by no means all.

A concoction of world rankings and country quotas will be used to decide who can and cannot participate so, taking this week’s standings as an example, Phil Mickelson (ranked 16th) would not take part but China’s Liang Wen-Chong and Finland’s Mikko Ilonen, ranked 401st and 346th respectively, would.

You’re probably thinking that would be a tad harsh on Lefty, right? Wrong.

If you have sympathy for anyone, save it for all those softball players, coaches and officials whose 12-year association with the Games from Atlanta through to Beijing was ended, along with that of baseball, at the same time as golf and rugby sevens were being embraced by the International Olympic Committee.

So, two sports already awash with money and enormous global tournaments of their own came in and two struggling on the margins were sent on their way. It’s a decision that is already taking its toll. For example, the Australian government has cut back significantly on its funding for their national softball body.

Melanie Roche, who has won two bronze medals and one silver with the Aussie softball team, was so incensed by the decision to cut them adrift from the Olympic raft that she considered sending her medals back to the IOC. She didn’t but her quotes in Australia’s Herald Sun newspaper three years ago made the point just as forcefully.

“At the highest level they are moving away from the ideals of Olympicism,” she said. “We’ve been a casualty of that. I’m not against golf or any other sport being at the Olympics. I think there should be a place for everyone. I just thought we’d been loyal to the Olympic movement and they should have been loyal to us.”

Roche may not be “against” golf being in the Olympics but many of us are. Same goes for rugby, soccer, tennis and basketball. Any sport in which an Olympic medal does not constitute the pinnacle of an athlete’s sporting career should not be considered. That all those sports named above boast players who are millionaires many times is neither here nor there because the Olympics and amateurism parted company a long time ago.

Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps aren’t exactly short of a few bob but the Jamaican sprinter and American swimmer do at least wake up every morning thinking about the next Olympic Games and, more importantly, training for it. Phelps, for all his wealth, does his dry-land training in a Baltimore shed that he compares to the Russian log cabin where Rocky Balboa prepared for his fight with Ivan Drago. All with one event in mind.

In 2016, Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy and 58 other golfers will play in a British Open, Olympic Games and a US PGA Championship inside a ridiculously chaotic four or five-week globetrotting window and you can be sure not a man among them would choose a gold medal ahead of the Claret Jug or Wanamaker Trophy.

In fact, with a schedule like that, it’s not outlandish to suspect the Olympic experience will all but pass most of them by. Just as it did Margaret Abbott.

* Contact: [e-mail] Twitter: @Rackob