Golf Tips and Golf News

Faster, higher stronger – these are ideals anybody can strive for, whether they have a job and a house or nothing at all. Admittedly people with enough money for professional training are at an advantage, but nobody is altogether excluded because they can’t afford to take part. To play golf, on the other hand, you require a certain degree of wealth that makes the sport entirely exclusive to richer countries. Golf doesn’t cost a fortune to play, but it does cost a lot more money than people in poorer countries have available. So I ask; how is it fair to include another event in the Olympics that many people simply cannot afford to compete in – one in which much of the outcome is actually dependent on the equipment you are using? Golf club memberships and clubs cost money - not huge amounts of money, but more than thousands of poor athletes could hope to raise.



Ethiopian distance runners train by jogging barefoot up mountains; how are they meant to train for golf? By fashioning golf clubs from sticks and tin cans, then hitting a ball across the sun-baked landscape? Tiger Woods’ golf clubs alone are probably worth more than the entire Ethiopian running team’s funding! By including golf in the Olympics, we have simply created another event to be dominated by the rich countries, purely on the grounds of them being rich enough to play it.
I accept that golf is as much a sport as any other at the Olympics, but the Olympics isn’t about including every sport under the sun. I also accept that many sports in the Olympics are of a similar nature; equestrian sports and shooting for example – I would argue that these also pervert the nature of the Games. The very philosophy behind the Olympics is about equality of completion – a level playing field upon which nothing matters apart from your own skill. Obviously wealth will always have an impact on training, but it should never exclude a group of people altogether.