2024 Olympics
The Olympics just wrapped up the first week of events, and oh man where there some good ones. Noah Lyles won the 100m final in a dramatic photo finish, both men and women won medals in team gymnastics, Simone Biles continues to show why she is the goat, and Katie Ledecky is winning by so much it looks like she is alone in the pool! And we still have a lot to go! But one event that did wrap up is the men’s golf, and since this is in fact a golf blog, lets focus on that.
In all honesty, it was a pretty boring first few days of golf in Paris. Although the leaderboard was shuffling around with Hideki Matsuyama of Japan leading after day 1, Xander Schauffele after day 2, and Spain’s Jon Rahm after day 3…it just didn’t feel like it held the weight of a top tier tournament. And then on Sunday things turned around.
Rahm had a multi-stroke lead through the front 9 and looked like the Jon Rahm that has won multiple majors. He was striking the ball how he wanted, making nearly all his putts, and seemed destined for the gold. But this is golf, and anything can happen. You can hit a hole in one and then on the next hole you could triple bogey. Neither happened for the Spaniard but he did see his 4 stroke lead go to a deficit pretty quickly, leading many to call it the biggest choke of the year.
Xander Schauffele after winning the Open just a few weeks ago, entered this tournament as the reigning gold medal finalist in the previous Olympics, had a share of the lead entering Sunday, but also struggled on the back and couldn’t make it to the podium.
That led the door open to none other than Scottie Scheffler. The guy that just seems to win every time he steps on a course. Scottie was 6 strokes back at one point on the back 9. That’s right…less than 9 holes to play and was 6 strokes behind. But that didn’t stop the unstoppable man from scoring a 62 in
the final round and taking advantage of those in front of him who couldn’t keep it together. He scored 4 straight birdies on the back and saved a fantastic shot in some deep rough to keep him in the top place as he wrapped up his day. The reigning Masters champion can now add gold medal to his rapidly growing list of accomplishments.
Tommy Fleetwood of Great Britain finished 2nd to claim silver, and Matsuyama rounded out the podium. Also big shout out to France’s Victor Perez who was a hometown favorite and shot an incredible 63 on Sunday but just barely missed that podium and finished 4th.
A slow start but a great finish for golf at the 2024 Olympics! The next will be in 2028 in Los Angeles and I’m not going to lie, the traffic sounds awful but we might have to consider going to that one!
2 OFF THE TEE 