Rio's Olympic golf course is in contrast to the neighbouring Lego-like towers and scrubby wasteland. Photo / AP
Rio's Olympic golf course is in contrast to the neighbouring Lego-like towers and scrubby wasteland. Photo / AP
There’s no tradition of golf in Brazil but the Olympics might just change that, writes Dylan Cleaver
When Lydia Ko or Danny Lee tees it up on the first hole at the Olympics in nine months, they'll be sizing up a relatively easy downwind par 5 - they'll also be looking at something of a minor miracle.
Held in the Barra da Tijuca Olympic area, about a90-minute drive southwest of downtown Rio de Janeiro (depending on the city's often choking traffic), it is difficult to imagine a more unprepossessing welcome to a golf course.
Just past seemingly endless American-styled shopping malls and high-rise condominiums stacked side by side like giant Lego towers, you turn into a small carpark in front of some scrubby land and mounds of earth and sand. There is not a tree to speak of in sight.
We're initially told we won't be allowed on the course but, after some bureaucratic squabbling, course superintendent Neil Cleverly leads a small gaggle of us across some wasteland, over a tussocky dune and there it is: an immaculate zeon zoysia-laid fairway leading to an undulating paspalum green.
It's the short par 3 17th, what Cleverly believes will be one of the signature holes as Rio prepares to host golf for the first time at the Olympics since 1904.
It has not been without pain. Brazil and golf go together like a house cat and water. There is no tradition of the sport here - until the creation of the Olympic course, there were just two other private courses in the city of 6.5 million inhabitants - and it has been seen as the exclusive domain of the exceedingly wealthy.
When the course was proposed at the Reserva de Marapendi, conservationists were up in arms. They believe several species of frogs and butterflies were evicted when subtropical vegetation was removed as the course was shaped and created.
Rio mayor Eduardo Paes has consistently argued that plant and animal life has increased, not decreased, and that as recently as the 1980s, aerial photographs show the land was covered in ugly concrete buildings.
It is an argument Cleverly is happy to take on with less of a nod towards diplomacy.
"Those environmentalists who are complaining need to go and find a tree to hug," he says. "We haven't removed any animals. We encourage them."
Although none showed themselves while I was there, neatly stacked piles of dung point to the prolific presence of capybara, the world's largest rodent. (Some were later spotted roadside: imagine a cross between a rat and a hamster, but the size of a pig.)
Down by one of the two ponds created for irrigation, jacare - a slightly smaller version of a crocodile - will sun themselves, a hazard probably best avoided. I cannot vouch for the affected frogs and butterflies, but the mosquitoes seem to be doing just fine.
Another point to note: there will be no concrete paths for carts.
"This is pure golf," Cleverly says. "You walk in with your bag just like you were meant to all those years ago. When you've finished, it should feel like you've walked six miles, not driven six miles."
As Cleverly, who has built 15 courses in 26 years, takes us to different points of the course, he explains the appeal of the Gil Hanse design. Essentially, it is about playing the wind as much as the course.
Golf player Lydia Ko. Photo / Getty Images
"These players will murder the course if the wind lays down, murder it," he says. "If the wind blows, they're going to have to get creative."
And it should blow. Since work began on the course close to three years ago, the wind has been brisk in August, Olympic month.
But what he really hopes is that the "people" will eventually grow to like it. While carving a stunning-looking course out of nothing in three years is a magnificent feat, perhaps the biggest coup of all is that this will not turn into a members-only course at the end of the Games.
The sceptics say the presence of half-constructed concrete towers overlooking the course is proof that exclusive property developers will piggy-back on the success of the course, but the mayor and course officials insist any Carioca will be invited to play here.
"There has never been street-level golf in Brazil," Cleverly says. "This is the first time. We are handing this course back to the people."
