Golf breathes sigh of relief with IOC approval

The announcement that golf is to be included in the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro generated a huge sigh of relief from the International Golf Federation (IGF), which conducted a 15-month campaign to achieve this end. Nevertheless, members of the IGF must be chastened to discover that golf attracted a significant number of votes against it, which suggests that there was a rump of IOC members who disapproved of the idea.
At the same meeting in Denmark, Sir Craig Reedie became the first Briton to be elected to the IOC’s executive board for almost half a century and Jacques Rogge was re-elected unopposed as president of the IOC and will serve until 2013.
The success of rugby sevens, the other nominated sport that needed to be endorsed by the members of the IOC in Copenhagen yesterday, heightened the impression that golf is fortunate to be granted Olympic status. Rugby sevens attracted 81 votes in favour of it and only eight against with one abstention, while 63 voted in favour of golf and 27 against and there were two abstentions.
It was clear this week that a rearguard action was being conducted against golf and that what had seemed almost a foregone conclusion at an IOC meeting in Lausanne in August, when rugby sevens and golf were recommended by the executive committee for rubber-stamping in Copenhagen, was far from that.
Golf, it was noted, was the only one of the seven sports bidding for inclusion in the Olympics not to be represented at the African Olympic Congress in Abuja, Nigeria, this year. The game’s chauvinist image — perpetuated by its men-only clubs such as Augusta National, where the Masters takes place each April — was a continuing cause of concern, as was the view that Brazil is no hotbed of golf.
Then there was the hardy perennial that the Olympics would not represent a sporting summit for the competitors in a sport where the annual four major championships are seens as the most valuable yardstick of greatness.
All in all, the IGF’s campaign — headed by Ty Votaw, chief executive of the IGF, and Peter Dawson, of the R & A — could be considered to have done well to have overcome these objections. Tiger Woods, the world No 1 who will be 40 by the time of the Rio Games, is already quoted at 6-1 to win gold, with the same odds on offer for a winner from Great Britain or Ireland.
Source:The times