Golf at the 2024 Paris Olympics
Gold Medals in Golf!
Olympic golf arrives on day six of the Paris Olympics! Both the men’s and women’s tournaments will take place over the next week, with your favorite golfers getting to represent their nation instead of just themselves.
The Basics
Golf is a straightforward game in principle and is effectively explained in its first rule: “The Game of Golf consists of playing a ball with a club from the teeing ground into the hole by a stroke or successive strokes in accordance with the Rules.” Players use different clubs based on varying criteria, including distance to the hole and playing surface.
The golf format at the Olympic Games is stroke play, which consists of counting the number of strokes a golfer takes to complete an 18-hole course played four times over four days. The player with the lowest number of strokes at the end of the four rounds wins the tournament.
Prior to the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, golf had featured on the Olympic program on just two occasions: in 1900 and 1904. The sport made its Olympic comeback in Brazil and was contested again at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games in 2021.
The Format
Both tournaments have 60 golfers. The top 15 in the world automatically qualified (with a maximum of 4 per country). Outside the top 15, countries could send a maximum of 2 athletes, or 1 if you have 3 in the top-15, or 0 if you’ve already qualified the maximum of 4. As it shakes out, the United States has 4 men and 3 women in the tournament. South Korea has 2 men and 3 women. Those are the only two countries with more than 4 athletes.
The format is like any golf tournament. 72 holes are spread out over 4 rounds. One exciting element is that ties need to be broken for all the medal spots. In pro golf, there’s usually only ties for 1st place. It’s a regular occurrence for 7 golfers to be bunched up and tied for 3rd place. Normally they just split the prize money, but in the Olympics, we need a 7-way tiebreaker for the bronze medal. They keep playing holes until 1 golfer is left standing. That’s what we saw in Tokyo.
The only countries with multiple medals since the sport was reintroduce in 2016 are the United States (they won gold in both events in 2021) and New Zealand (both medals belong to Lydia Ko, who is competing again this year).
Schedule
August 1st: Men’s Round 1
August 2nd: Men’s Round 2
August 3rd: Men’s Round 3
August 4th: Men’s Round 4
August 7th: Women’s Round 1
August 8th: Women’s Round 2
August 9th: Women’s Round 3
August 10th: Women’s Round 4