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The Volvo Golf Champions tournament scheduled to be staged at the Royal Golf Club next January is likely to be moved to a course in South Africa.
Sources say the organisers have had ‘cold feet’ over kicking off the European Tour’s 2012 season in Bahrain because of the unrest last March and the adverse international publicity the kingdom has received in recent weeks.
Officially they say they will hold a meeting shortly to discuss its future.
Despite stating publicly that the Race to Dubai and The European Tour would ‘start in Bahrain’ featuring winners from this season, Volvo Event Management president Per Ericsson this week was on the back foot.
He told GulfWeekly: “Due to what happened in Bahrain after our tournament, we, the European Tour and Volvo Event Management-Golf, have not yet made up our minds for 2012, but will do so in August at the latest. All parties will meet in a couple of weeks in order to discuss the issue, at this time no decisions are made.”
Unofficially, the organisers fear the sport’s star players could be swamped by protests orchestrated by international activists despite the fact that a national dialogue involving all sides with an interest in taking Bahrain forward to a peaceful and prosperous future starts in the next few days.
A source told GulfWeekly: “Volvo Golf Champions is going to South Africa as will the world final of the amateur tournament, which goes wherever Volvo Golf Champions goes.
“Believe me, Volvo Golf Champions is neither coming back to Bahrain nor will it be the first event on the 2012 calendar, the first tranche of which will be announced around the time of The Open Championship at England’s Royal St George’s Golf Club on July 14-17.
“There was huge concern about the events which erupted just a few weeks after our first golfing event was staged in Bahrain in January and subsequently what happened with the international backlash over trying to reschedule the F1 race – the way drivers and teams were targeted by campaigners just rubber-stamped matters.”
In recent days the activist website Avaaz.org has been claiming ‘victory’ because the Gulf Air Bahrain Grand Prix was not rescheduled this season.
It described the country as ‘brutal’ and encouraged its followers to leave more than 20,000 messages on the internet social networking Facebook and Twitter pages of the F1 teams.
“We released our reaction, igniting a media firestorm, and finally ... the F1 teams unanimously objected to the race date in Bahrain, forcing F1 to cancel the Bahrain race for 2011!” its website crowed.
Avaaz is managed by a team working from Switzerland, Brazil, the United States, Argentina and the United Kingdom. Its individual co-founders include executive director Ricken Patel, a Canadian citizen living in New York. He was interviewed on global TV and radio news channels protesting about the F1 being staged in the kingdom.
However, he, and other Avaaz officials, failed to respond to questions from GulfWeekly and several Bahrain residents unhappy about its coverage of events in Bahrain and its bully-boy tactics.
The European Tour was set to break new ground in 2012, and also mirror the PGA Tour, with a ‘winners’ only’ event in Bahrain to start the new season. The Volvo Golf Champions event in Bahrain was to be the first tournament of the 2012 Race to Dubai schedule.
While this year’s inaugural event – won by Paul Casey – played on the Colin Montgomerie-designed Royal Golf Club course featured 126 players who between them captured 28 victories in last year’s Race to Dubai, from next year, the event would have been entirely for tournament winners from the 2011 Race to Dubai programme.
“This year’s first event is just the beginning and while it’s been a high profile start … as of 2012 Volvo Golf Champions will be the season starting event,” Mr Ericsson promised just five months ago.
Those words will ring hollow if the event organisers pull out as expected. It appears little can convince them that Bahrain is safe, secure and the stars would be left alone to concentrate on playing.
Although losing out on the event will not be as catastrophic economically as cancelling the Gulf Air Bahrain Grand Prix it will still prove a blow to the nation’s international image, the Royal Golf Club team who have invested a huge amount of time, energy and money in making the course ready and sports-lovers living on the island.
The global TV audience it attracts helps showcase the kingdom’s attractive business environment for companies looking to access the Gulf region, Bahrain’s Economic Development Board (EDB) says.
Significantly, the EDB or the Royal Golf Club have not yet been invited to the talks on the event’s future which contractually they would have been obliged to attend were the event coming back to the kingdom.
