The Olympic Qualifying Cut-Off Date Ignores A Key Week

There are many ins-and-outs to working with the IOC and the golf movement tried to address as many as possible, though we're still left with an uninspired individual stroke play format. Golf can survive that. 

But now that the madness that is the jam-packed 2016 schedule starts to become more clear, Derek Lawrenson points out in his Daily Mail column another oddity leading into Rio: The Open Championship is a little more than a month before the Olympics and the cut-off date for Games qualifying is the Sunday prior.

As Lawrenson points out, a resurgent Tiger Woods could be on the fringes of qualifying, then win at Royal Troon. And he would not make the Olympics.

I had to read this several times as well to make sure I had got it right. You mean to tell me that Tiger could win The Open next year and the US PGA but if he was ranked outside the world’s top 15 before both events were staged he would not be in Rio? Yep, that’s the strength of it. How stupid would golf look in those circumstances?