Richer World Cup now biennial
The Omega Mission Hills World Cup will no longer be an annual event – partly because of the Olympics Games.
The Omega Mission Hills World Cup will no longer be an annual event – partly because of the Olympics Games.
The championship, it was announced on Monday by the International Federation of PGA Tours, the International Golf Association and sponsors Omega and Mission Hills, will skip this year and return to interntional golfing schedules in 2011 as a biennial event with a record prize fund of $7.5 million,with as much as $2.4 million going to the winners.
The two-man team event, won by Italian brothers Francesco and Edoardo Molinari last year, will be staged at the Mission Hills Resort on Hainan Island in southern China from November 24-27 next year.
The move to a biennial event follows last year’s decision by the International Olympic Committee to reintroduce golf to the Olympics from 2016.
By playing the event in alternate years from 2011, the World Cup is aligning itself with many of the other major sports in the Olympic movement, such as the World Athletics Championships, which are contested biennially and do not clash with the summer and winter Olympic Games.
Although the first prize has more than doubled, The format will remain unchanged, with two-man international teams contesting two series of foursomes and two series of fourballs on alternate days.
Although Tiger Woods has twice won the World Cup – with Mark O’Meara in 1999 and David Duval in 2000 – many of the game’s top stars have opted to miss the event in recent years.
And Stephen Urquhart, president of Omega, admitted: “In addition to finding a coherent strategy in relation to the Olympics, one of the main reasons for making the World Cup a biennial event is that it should give all the federations involved a better opportunity to send their best teams to represent their country.
“We are confident that we can make important inroads in our primary objective, which is to re-establish the World Cup in its rightful position.”
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