Golf Golf is a club-and-ball sport in which players use various clubs to hit balls into a series of holes on a course in as few strokes as possible. Golf, unlike most ball games, cannot and does not use a standardized playing area, and coping wi ...

was featured in the

Summer Olympic Games The Summer Olympic Games (french: link=no, Jeux olympiques d'été), also known as the Games of the Olympiad, and often referred to as the Summer Olympics, is a major international multi-sport event normally held once every four years. The ina ...

official programme in

1900 As of March 1 ( O.S. February 17), when the Julian calendar acknowledged a leap day and the Gregorian calendar did not, the Julian calendar fell one day further behind, bringing the difference to 13 days until February 28 ( O.S. February 15), 2 ...

and 1904. At the IOC session in

Copenhagen Copenhagen ( or .; da, København ) is the capital and most populous city of Denmark, with a proper population of around 815.000 in the last quarter of 2022; and some 1.370,000 in the urban area; and the wider Copenhagen metropolitan a ...

in October 2009, the IOC decided to reinstate this event for the

2016 Summer Olympics ) , nations = 207 (including IOA and EOR teams) , athletes = 11,238 , events = 306 in 28 sports (41 disciplines) , opening = 5 August 2016 , closing = 21 August 2016 , opened_by = Vice President Michel Temer , cauldron = Vanderlei Cordeiro de ...

. The International Golf Federation is governing body for golf at the Olympic Games. As of the 2016 Olympics, qualification is based primarily upon the

Official World Golf Ranking The Official World Golf Ranking is a system for rating the performance level of professional golfers. It was started in 1986. The rankings are based on a player's position in individual tournaments (i.e. not pairs or team events) over a "rolli ...

(men) and

Women's World Golf Rankings The Women's World Golf Rankings, also known for sponsorship reasons as the Rolex Rankings, were introduced in February 2006. They are sanctioned by eight women's golf tours and the organisations behind them: Ladies Professional Golf Association ( ...

, with the top 15 of each gender automatically qualifying (with a limit of four per country), and then the highest ranked players from countries that had not yet already qualified two players.

Medal table

Sources:

Total

Men

Women

Events

;

* Men's individual * Women's individual ; 1904 * Men's individual * Men's team ; 2016 * Men's individual * Women's individual ; 2020 * Men's individual * Women's individual A men's individual tournament was planned for the 1908 London Games, but an internal dispute amongst British golfers led to them boycotting the event, leaving 1904 gold medallist George Lyon as the only competitor. Offered the gold medal by default, Lyon refused to accept it. Present day, the Olympic golf tournaments only consists of a men's individual

stroke play Stroke play, also known as medal play, is a scoring system in the sport of golf in which the total number of strokes is counted over one or more rounds of 18 holes. In stroke play, the winner is the player who has taken the fewest strokes over the ...

and women's individual stroke play. There has been calls for the IGF and the IOC to consider adding a

match play Match play is a scoring system for golf in which a player, or team, earns a point for each hole in which they have bested their opponents; as opposed to stroke play, in which the total number of strokes is counted over one or more rounds of 18 h ...

tournament or to open up the Olympic tournament to more golfers by using a different qualifying system than the World Golf Ranking.

Courses

Medal summary

Men's individual

Women's individual

Men's team

Participating nations

22 golfers competed in 1900. The 1904 tournament featured 77 golfers. Albert Lambert was the only golfer who competed both times; a total of 98 different golfers competed throughout the brief history of Olympic golf before it was brought back in 2016.

References

External links

International Olympic Committee results database
{{Golf at multi-sport events

Olympic Games The modern Olympic Games or Olympics (french: link=no, Jeux olympiques) are the leading international sporting events featuring summer and winter sports competitions in which thousands of athletes from around the world participate in a multi ...