Thursday Threads

The bride will be headed to London later today, and in honor thereof we have an internationally-centric post for you.

Is There A Vaccine For That? - Olympic fever is everywhere, so to ensure that I can see you through this spectacle that is to save our game, it's only prudent to seek inoculation.  Shack links us to this Guardian story of the status one year out.  Forgive this long excerpt, but is any of this a surprise?

The IOC has previously called Rio preparations the worst ever; many projects are running late and, with constructors working overtime, costs are soaring. Many contracts are not government-funded, which have heightened concerns that venues, land and infrastructure will be used for private profit rather than for public use after the Games. Overall the progress report stands at around 60%. At this point before London 2012, 80% of venues and infrastructure had been completed. Despite this, officials are confident all venues will be ready for the test events later this year, which was not the case for the World Cup. 

Pollution is also a serious issue. Earlier this year, 32 tonnes of dead fish were removed from the lagoon where the Olympic rowing and canoeing events will take place and Guanabara Bay has been called an “open sewer” by Olympic sailors. Events could yet be moved to entirely new locations, according to officials. 

Extra police will be drafted in during the Olympics to combat the high levels of crime. Mass robberies, known as arrastões are common, particularly on beaches such as Copacabana. Armed military police are widely used – 582 people in Rio died at the hands of the police in 2014. South‑east Brazil is experiencing its worst drought in 50 years and with 70% of the country’s electricity coming from hydroelectric power, there is both a water and energy crisis threatening Rio next year. To compensate, the continued expansion of hydropower in Amazonia is creating further problems, with deforestation and the displacement of indigenous people. As residents in Rio face water rationing, 5m litres of water are pumped over the Olympics golf course every day to keep it green.

Dog, fleas.  And Lord knows that the IOC is pretty much an open sewer itself, but I am looking forward to those swimming and sailing events.

But how great is it going to be seeing the best players in the world competing for Olympic Gold?  Well, not all of the best players. as Kevin Maguire elucidates:

That's because the system used to set the Olympic field -- in which everyone inside the

top 15 in the Official World Golf Rankings gets in -- has a maximum of four golfers per country. And once you get outside the top 15, no nation can have more than two players.

And therein lies the controversy. Americans could be Nos. 1-5 in the world, but only the first four get spots on the Olympic team. As of now, seven Americans are inside the top 15. That leaves Dustin Johnson, Zach Johnson and Jimmy Walker watching the Games from home. 

So how is Team USA looking so far? As of now, Jordan Spieth, Bubba Watson,Rickie Fowler and Jim Furyk would be wearing the red, white and blue.

Good thing they set it up so that Tiger would want to play... But the important thing is that Thomas Pieters will have a tee time.

Bob Harig catches Rickie channeling his inner Yogi:

"It's a new thing for golf obviously being the first time in there,'' said Rickie Fowler, ranked fifth in the world. "For me, it would be a dream come true I haven't ever dreamt of. You always watch the Olympics, and you look at the opening ceremonies and closing ceremonies and being around the best athletes in the world in their respective sports.

Yes, you read that correctly...The International Golf Federation has posted a number of photos of the golf course, which appears to be effectively using that 5m litres of water and growing in nicely:

This story might also amuse:

Golf has emerged in the most recent World Anti Doping Agency (Wada) figures as having a significantly higher percentage of Adverse Analytical Findings (AAF) than athletics, cycling, rugby or soccer. 

An AAF identifies the presence of a prohibited substance or its metabolites or markers in any given sample. 

The 2015 figures, which collates all of the samples analysed and reported by accredited Wada laboratories throughout the world in 2014, shows that golf scored a 1.6 per cent rate of positive drugs tests compared to 1.0 per cent for both athletics and cycling and 0.8 per cent for rugby.

As we know, cycling is the gold standard of doping, so well done, lads.  Now we interrupt your regularly-scheduled schadenfreude to bring you this nuanced explanation from Commissioner Ratched's loyal manservant Ty Votaw:

“I think in a vacuum, these are just lab-level analysis. It doesn’t give you the

circumstances,” Votaw told GolfChannel.com. “If most of the drugs are cortico-steroids or diuretics, there is a very real possibility that those have TUEs associated with them. We don’t consider them to be performance-enhancing in the first place. Now diuretics, I suppose, can be used as a masking agent of some sort to someone else, but we aren’t seeing a lot of diuretics in our testing.” 

Votaw added that WADA does not have access to the test results or samples from the lab through which the Tour conducts its regular testing, meaning the 507 samples in question came from other corners of the game.

Well, duh, Ty, of course they didn't come from your testing, as you guys don't take blood samples.  And since blood samples are necessary to test for HGH and the other nasties, we take your point that there's nothing to see here and will move on to our nest story.

Prez Cup Doings - Earlier this week I saw this item:

Years of lobbying for changes to the Presidents Cup format by International team captain Nick Price may finally make an impact, pending a meeting this week at the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational between Price and PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem. 

A Reuters report indicates that Price and Finchem are set to meet Wednesday in Akron to discuss Price’s ideas for change, rooted in lowering the amount of points up for grabs in the team portion of the competition.

Where are you going with this, Nick?

“Those 22 points in the team matches make it very easy for one team to get so far ahead that it takes all the excitement out of the Sunday singles,” Price told Reuters. “With the structure of the Presidents Cup as it is right now, you have a chance where it could be 16 points to 6 going into the last-day singles, or 17-5 or 15-7.

“If you want the strongest team to win every time, then make as many points as you want, play everyone every day and then the Americans are probably going to win 90 percent of the time.”

So we want the strongest team to lose?  That's gonna be an interesting discussion, no?  But he seems to be admitting that his squad isn't up to the American standards, whereas I'm not as convinced of that.  But Joel Beall adds his own list of suggested changes, and they're downright curious, such as this:

Replace alternate shot with a scramble

Can you imagine the drives Dustin Johnson would unleash knowing he had a safe ball in the fairway, or the type of pin-seeking we'd see from Spieth or Rickie Fowler? It would be like watching a Golden Tee round come to life.

Alternate shot is the best part of these team competitions, because it takes the players out of their comfort zones.  DJ will be bombing and the others will be pin-hunting enough in the fourballs, and we want our guys experiencing foursomes in this event, so the Ryder Cup won't be a complete unknown when they're sent out in foursomes.

Joel also takes them to task on their venues and offers some good suggestions that will be dutifully ignored.  But the Prez Cup venues have been far better than the Ryder Cup venues, no?

Nick Rangos, RIP - Don't know Nick?  Shame on you, as he made a major contribution to the game as we know it today:

The name Nick Rangos likely won’t resonate with many, but he was to a sandwich as Gene Sarazen was to a sand wedge.

Rangos was the man responsible for the renowned pimento cheese recipe used in sandwiches at Augusta National Golf Club during the Masters. Rangos, 86, died on Aug. 1, the Aiken (S.C.) Standard has reported.

The devil is in the details, as this bit makes clear:

“At the outset, he was just doing it to provide a living for his family,” his son Billy once told ESPN. “But at some point, the pimento cheese did become somewhat famous. He took a great deal of pride in knowing that.There were several articles written over the years about my dad’s pimento cheese, and he really enjoyed reading those. He had a smile on his face when he saw those articles.” 

Aiken Standard writer Dede Biles wrote that “Billy believes Augusta National’s policy of making the pimento cheese sandwiches fresh every day helped enhance the filling’s flavor.”

I'm thinking that you don't need to be Bobby Flay to know that day-old pimento cheese sitting in the Georgia sun isn't going to end well...

Trip Preview -  Our previous required reading was mercifully brief, but this morning we're going to challenge your attention span by linking to this wonderful David Owen article in the New Yorker describing how the reclamation all came about.  Here's your tease:

At lunch, one of the members surprised Irvine by saying that Askernish was more than a century old and had been designed by Old Tom Morris, a towering figure in the history and folklore of the game. Morris, who was born in 1821 and looked a little like Charles Darwin in an ivy cap, was the founding father of modern golf. In the eighteen-sixties, he won four of the first eight British Opens and became the head professional of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, serving there for four decades as the chief greenkeeper of the Old Course, golf’s holiest ground. He also designed or redesigned several of the world’s greatest courses, among them Muirfield, Prestwick, and Carnoustie, in Scotland, and Royal County Down, in Northern Ireland.

Irvine was polite but dismissive: the course he’d walked that morning was a cow pasture with flagsticks stuck in the ground, and he doubted that Morris, whose courses he knew well, had ever come near it. But another club member said that this was not the original Askernish, and that Old Tom’s layout had had eighteen holes and was situated closer to the sea. Most of the original holes, apparently, had been abandoned, probably beginning around the time of the Second World War. Ralph Thompson said that the club possessed a news clipping from 1891 which described Morris’s creation of the course that year, and which quoted Morris calling the layout “second to none.” Irvine was curious enough to take another look, and after lunch Thompson drove him back.

Second to none?  We'll see about that now, won't we?