The Politics Of Paralympics Golf

Great work by Golf News Net's Ryan Ballengee to lay out the issues involved in getting golf as a Paralympic sport.

I'm fairly certain that golf's inclusion in the Games will only be strengthened by the effort--by no means an easy one as Ballengee presents--to have a Paralympics presence. Sadly, there is no opportunity now until 2024 and the IGF did not respond to Ballengee's requests for comment. In their defense, it has been a busy few weeks.

However, para-golf lacked some key baseline organizational infrastructure that the IPC demands of any sport before it gets into the Paralympics. In para-golf's case, the sport hadn't organized a continuously-run world championship, had never published a world ranking for disabled golfers and had yet to develop a clear classification code for para-golfers to compete under in the program.

Four years later, para-golf could again bid to get into the 2020 program in Tokyo. However, no bid was even made. The International Golf Federation didn't submit a bid, according to Matsuda, claiming a lack of integration among the world's leading disabled golf associations. In other words, things had not dramatically improved in the intervening four years since the initial bid to merit going through the political process of making a bid, defending and lobbying for it, then hoping for inclusion.