NEWSLETTER
Le Golf National – The Albatros course at Le Golf National will be the tournament course for the men’s golf competition during the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris. This will be the third Olympic tournament for golf since the sport returned to the Olympics in 2016, when British professional golfer Justin Rose won in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In the 2020 games in Tokyo, American golfer Xander Schauffele secured the gold medal.
Located just southwest of central Paris, Le Golf National hosts the Open de France on the DP World Tour annually, which is the oldest national open in continental Europe. Having already hosted the Ryder Cup in 2018, it will become the first course to have hosted both the Ryder Cup and the Olympics.
The course features a mix of Florida-style, Irish links, and French design elements. It has narrow fairways, challenging rough, tricky greens, water hazards on 10 holes, and one of the toughest closing stretches in golf. The Albatros Course has a very high 155 slope rating.
Nine players from both the American and European Ryder Cup teams in 2018 will compete at Le Golf National this week. The course is different from the setup six years ago, with the return of the first and second cuts of rough and even firmer greens. Additionally, 27 out of the 60 golfers in the field have previously played at Le Golf National during the French Open, an annual event on the DP World Tour.
The International Golf Federation (IGF) uses the Official World Golf Rankings (OWGR) to determine eligibility for the Olympic Golf Rankings (OGR). The top 15 world-ranked players are eligible for the Olympics, with a limit of four players from a given country. After that, players are eligible based on the world rankings, with a maximum of two players from each country that does not already have two or more players among the top 15. This continues until 60 athletes are selected, including continental places.
With only 60 golfers in the tournament and a cap of four players per country, only 20 of the top 50 players in the world rankings will be in Paris. The four American golfers include Scottie Scheffler (the number one player in the world), Xander Schauffele (the defending Gold medal winner), Wyndham Clark (a first-time Olympian), and Collin Morikawa (who lost in a playoff for the Bronze medal in the 2020 Olympics). Rory McIlroy, Ludvig Aberg, Viktor Hovland, and Jon Rahm are among the other top-10 golfers in the world who are participating in the event.
Designed by Hubert Chesnaeu and Robert Van Hagge, Le Golf National opened near Versailles on the outskirts of Paris in 1991. It is owned and managed by the French Golf Federation and serves as a national training center in addition to hosting tournaments. The site features three different courses, but one, the Albatros, will host the Olympic tournament. It is a shorter par 71 that will extend to 7,174 yards.
The course combines the traditional style of a links track with the modern features of target golf, along with the plentiful water hazards of a Florida-style design. While there are significant mounds, humps, and undulations across the layout, the property was flat farmland four decades ago. The building of the course required 300 trucks per day of materials from downtown Paris for three years to add elevation to the land. Many water hazards were created because the clay silt of the Parisian basin does not drain well. It has few trees because it needed to be ready to host the French Open in 1991.
Le Golf National has regularly been one of the toughest courses in the DP World Tour rotation. The average winning score across the past ten French Opens played around 11 under par. At last year’s French Open, only four players managed four under-par rounds. Links-style pot bunkers line both the fairways and surround several greens.
Many believe that Le Golf National resembles TPC Sawgrass, host of March’s PLAYERS Championship, in numerous ways, including its amphitheater stadium-style viewing areas, its overall length, its emphasis on accuracy and strategy over distance off the tee, and its risk-reward drama on three of the final four holes, including two island greens. As Phil Mickelson said about the course before Europe’s beatdown of the U.S. in 2018, “I think it’s phenomenal because it’s got the best viewing of any golf course I’ve seen, as well as the risk-reward. The last four holes are spectacular.”
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