Brazil can carry golfing torch beyond 2016

Five Years until Golf Steps into the Olympic Ring

Legacy: Candy Hanneman, above, hopes that golf’s apperance at Rio 2016 will help the sport to flourish in Brazil

August 5^th 2011 marks five years to go before Rio de Janeiro hosts South America’s first Olympics and golf returns to sports’ biggest stage for the first time since 1904. Tim Maitland looks at how the sport is evolving in Brazil as 2016 inches nearer.

From Rio de Janeiro’s perspective, the final piece of the Olympic jigsaw was put into place in June when, during the IOC Coordination Commission’s visit, the decision to build a new course in Barra da Tijuca, rather than to refashion the nearby Itanhanga Golf Club, was made. For the Rio 2016 Organising Committee it meant that the venue master plan was complete.

With the five-years-to-go point upon us, it gives golf fans a clearer picture of what golf in the Olympics will be like, but what will Olympic status do for golf in Brazil? Well, just as for the golf world in general, the opportunity is far greater than two four-round Olympic events; it’s already put golf into a whole new stratosphere of Brazilian sport.

“Golf in Brazil was growing steadily every year, but now with this new opportunity and with golf returning to the Olympics here in Rio de Janeiro, things are changing dramatically,” says Rachid Orra, president of the South American Golf Federation and of the Brazilian Golf Confederation.

“Even the Brazilian government is interested in helping us develop golf in Brazil. It’s an opportunity that we have to take very seriously to give big steps in the development of golf. The investment in money is not yet significant, but I’m sure this will grow very fast in the future.”

Brazil’s former LPGA player Candy Hannemann insists that has to be just part of a far bigger aim.

“It’s a project. Our goal is not just the 2016 Olympics. It is ‘how can we help the 2016 Olympics kick-start more of a golf tradition in the country? And then how can we go on from there?’ I think the project is more than just 2016,” says the 32-year-old Hannemann, who played for five years on the LPGA until a wrist injury forced her off the tour in 2008.

Rio’s Dilemma

Rio’s challenge is that the Japeri Golfe Clube, the only public facility in the entire city, it is losing two of its nine holes because of road expansions prior to the Olympics. The other two golf courses, Itanhanga Golf Club and Gavea Golf & Country Club, are the high-end private members facilities.

“It’s a Catch 22!” says Hannemann.

“There needs to be people playing for somebody to invest in it, but nobody will play unless there is a place to play. Here the investment needs to come with a leap of faith; a belief that the game’s going to grow and be marketed in a way that will bring the game to the mass, because that’s when golf becomes big.”

Right across the board in Rio there’s a consensus that the issue of accessibility to the sport needs to be solved if golf is going to benefit from the Olympics.

“The most important thing is the facilities,” insists Enio Ribeiro of Brasil1, the biggest of the country’s sports marketing companies involved in the golf industry.

“Brazil has 200 million people and only 25,000 golfers. Argentina has 50 million people and 200,000 golfers. Because of the economy we definitely have around 10 million people that could play golf. What we need to do is have facilities that can allow them to try it,” says Ribeiro.

“We need some big magic…not magic…we have to work harder,” adds Rachid Orra.

“It would be easier if we had a lot of public courses to put a lot of people from schools directly into playing golf, but the Brazilian reality is not like this so we have to work 10 times harder than in America for instance. We need much more driving ranges here.”

The good news from Rio’s point of view is that, with almost every major stakeholder in golf engaged in the process of preparing for the Rio Games, help is more available than it has ever been in finding the fix to the Catch 22 issue.

Building Awareness

The days when Gary Player and Hale Irwin etched their names on the Brazil Open trophy in the 70s and 80s are a distant memory. And the European Tour’s events to mark the 500-year celebrations of Pedro Alvaras Cabral’s “discovery” of the country in 1500 marked the anniversary and quickly disappeared.

For the moment, it’s left to the limited-field unofficial HSBC LPGA Brasil Cup to fly the flag as the only truly international tournament. From a perspective of golf’s heartlands it might be hard to believe that a US$720,000 event could sustain the role, but the feedback locally says otherwise.

Rachid Orra, with his South American Golf Federation hat on, described the victory by Columbia’s Mariajo Uribe at the end of May over a field that included both Cristie Kerr and Suzann Pettersen, as being as significant to the region as Jhonattan Vegas’ victory at the Bob Hope Classic in January; even though Vegas’ win has single-handedly changed Venezuela president Hugo Chavez’s attitude to the sport.

“Symbolically, it’s the same thing because it’s a girl that has beaten some of the best players in the world!” declares Orra.

“It’s very important for us. The coming of the HSBC LPGA Brasil Cup was a very important step for us, taken three years ago. This is another one. Both are very, very, very important.”

Before the event, Rio’s biggest newspaper, O Globo, shoved aside some of its wall-to-wall soccer coverage to give Pettersen and Kerr posing at a photocall on Botafogo beach prime position on the second page of its sport section, briefly relegating the news of Flamengo, Fluminense, Botafogo and Vasco da Gama. Such coverage of golf hasn’t been seen in recent memory.

The landscape is changing, too. The Brazilian Golf Confederation has just announced a domestic national tour, starting small with a plan for three events in 2011. By the end of the year the Tour de las Americas is likely to be absorbed into a far larger Latin American PGA Tour covering South America and the Caribbean and providing the region’s top players a direct route into the Nationwide Tour and, hopefully, following Brazil’s Alex Rocha and Jhonattan Vegas into the big leagues.

Brazil certainly has both the vibrant, growing economy and the availability of land that could potentially fuel an explosion in golf course development similar to China. On the other hand it is unlikely to undergo a large-scale change socio-economically.

“China is a completely different planet. They are another kind of world,” Orra chuckles.

“The numbers there are fantastic, but I think golf in 10 years will be completely different to what it is now. Brazil will be very competitive in golf and it will be a much more known sport than it is today. I think we’ll be surprised and we’ll be very happy to see what will have happened here.”

Bryce Ritchie is the Editor of bunkered and, in addition to leading on content and strategy, oversees all aspects of the brand. The first full-time journalist employed by bunkered, he joined the company in 2001 and has been editor since 2009. A member of Balfron Golfing Society, he currently plays off nine and once got a lesson from Justin Thomas’ dad.

Editor