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EXECUTIVES at the Royal Golf Club are still on tenterhooks as to whether the Riffa Views course will host next year’s Volvo Golf Champions tournament.
The event was originally set to be staged next January taking pride of place as the first official event on The European Tour international schedule.
“The provisional schedule up to the Masters (in April) is currently being finalised, and we hope to release it at some point next month,” said Paul Symes, European Tour press officer.
As GulfWeekly revealed, organisers have suffered ‘cold feet’ about staging the event in the kingdom because of the unrest last March and the rabid international media response to plans to reschedule a F1 grand prix in Bahrain this season, which ultimately had to be axed.
The story sent shockwaves around the golfing community and a concerted effort was made to convince Volvo Event management president Per Ericsson that the island was safe and secure with a National Dialogue in full flow and an independent commission reviewing what happened and looking at the road ahead.
A recent face-to-face meeting in London with the Bahrain Economic Development Board may have paid dividends.
Asked if the tour was still set to kick-off with the Volvo Golf Champions in Bahrain in January, Symes said: “I believe that is the case.”
This is the first glimmer of hope since Ericsson stated that the European Tour and Volvo Event Management-Golf have not yet ‘made up its minds for 2012’ despite earlier announcing that the event would open the season in Bahrain, and insiders leaked that the Gardener Ross Golf Club in Gauteng, South Africa, had been provisionally booked to host the tournament at a later date.
The Tour’s full schedule is normally revealed around late October or early November, Symes added.
Six months ago Bahrain successfully became the latest destination of the European Tour’s global odyssey. Plans to stage the event here were revealed exclusively by GulfWeekly.
The inaugural Volvo Golf Champions made its debut on the Colin Montgomerie-designed course and was won by Paul Casey after a pot of around BD900,000 attracted some of the sport’s top players and a massive global TV audience.
It was Volvo’s 10th title sponsored event in 22 years with the European Tour, and took place between the Abu Dhabi Golf Championship, the traditional curtain-raiser to the ‘Middle East Swing’, and the Qatar Masters.
The Royal Golf Club’s general manager Susan Stephenson recently told members that Volvo and sports agency IMG were still in discussions about the venue for the Volvo Golf Champions 2012 tournament and no firm decision had yet been reached, adding that the tour schedule ‘would be finalised in the latter half of July’.
GulfWeekly has also been told that the club was ‘unhappy’ with this newspaper’s recent coverage of the full swing fiasco – despite at no time suggesting it was of any fault of the club – and as a result its professional Chris Kelby would no longer be writing his regular column.
