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Power cuts, 80mph winds, airports closed and trains delayed. Even Leeds Festival has been hampered by the wild winds in the UK this week - but perhaps the biggest sporting event of the week ploughs ahead regardless.
At St. Andrews in Fife, an exposed stretch of land is open to the elements at the best of times, but it’s also one of the most sought-after locations in the British Isles if you happen to be a golf fan. There, the Women’s Open is taking place, some of the game’s finest talents taking on each other and the weather conditions in the search for one of the sport’s biggest trophies...and £7.3m in prize money.
Two weeks ago Charley Hull was in Paris representing GB at the Olympics in the searing heat of France; back in Scotland, she took a first-round lead ahead of Nelly Korda and Lilia Vu to set hopes of a first LPGA major aflame. There’s a long way to go though and, as many of the players noted, it’s nowhere near just about their game of golf this weekend - nor even the tricky course.
“It was super tough. I mean, you just have to be on every single shot. You have to be really disciplined,” Vu said after her first round. “Front nine, wind’s off the left, kind of between hurting and helping, and then back nine, you kind of have to rewire your brain: okay, wind’s off the right, it's okay to hit out to the right and then have it come back. It's just definitely a mental battle.”
It was a common theme heard from so many of the players - the unpredictable wind speed dropping, the battle to go against a ‘normal’ approach shot and the sheer fact that these conditions are simply not what they are used to facing, as Georgia Hall - another Team GB representative - was at pains to point out.
“[This was] definitely some of the toughest conditions I’ve ever played inm for sure,” she said. “Just thankful it wasn’t raining, I mean, you couldn’t even read the greens because you had to think about where the wind was actually going. It was probably the windiest I’ve ever played in, it was a struggle for sure, like mentally, such a battle.”
And yet, this wasn’t a negative reaction - Hall is at home on this type of course and in these types of conditions.
Not that her rivals might all be feeling the same way, of course.
“I was very glad we didn’t stop play. I love those conditions, whether I play bad or not. This is a true Women’s Open like this, and I believe that’s how it should be every day; that’s part of the battle with the weather and I just tried to make the most out of that out there.
“I looked out of my hotel room and I can see the range, the flags on the range and that’s a good indicator for me and at 5.00am they were blowing a gale, and I was like, that’s great. Hope it stays like that. I’m not sure many players would agree with me! I hardly get to play like this. I play in America a lot, and to me it’s more of a wooden form of golf. This is natural, raw golf.”
Certainly, some of those visiting from further afield struggled - particularly when it came to putting, where the shorter grass with less stopping power made it tricky to judge lengths to the hole when the wind gathered pace.
“The greens are usually faster so the ball is actually rolling off. But I’ve never had to back off so many putts. I’m standing and losing balance. It’s definitely memorable,” the American Rose Zhang said. “I went to go move my ball on [hole] seven and it moved this much. You get anxiety thinking, ‘did I just do something?’ but reality is Mother Nature decided to move your ball a bit. That was the craziest thing.”
Gemma Dryburgh is a Scot - from Aberdeen - so the weather wouldn’t have been anything new but even she admitted she was “a bit blown away” and that her ball was “blowing off the tee [...] and on the fairway.”
“My ball moved twice before I putted. I don’t know how it was playable to be honest, especially those holes like 7 and 11 right out there,” she added.
Hall also noted there was a point when the players feared that the day would be cut short, but praised the greenkeeping for the proactive approach. “I was a bit worried a few times but I think the R&A are very clever with letting the greens be a bit slower so the balls weren’t rolling. I think if they cut them to a certain length, we would have to stop. So credit to the R&A for that.”
It makes sense, then, to finish with exactly how the R&A - the organisation which owns St. Andrews and hosts the Women’s Open - managed to combat that, with CEO Martin Slumbers detailing the approach.
“The met office who help us here have been forecasting this for a while now. We have slowed the golf course down quite a bit. We've raised the height of cut on the greens, we've put a bit of water on them to help them grow a little bit. We've got some pretty good ideas about where we can put the pins to actually protect it as much as we possibly can,” he explained.
“Most importantly, we will set it up in a way that the players can play. The good news is the wind is forecast all four days to come from pretty much the same quadrant, so we can - we know where we can put the pins to give them some room.
“There is a risk that we'll have delays in play, but we'll deal with that. I think the best players in the world want a bit of a hard challenge.”
Thanks to Storm Lilian, they’ve certainly got that this weekend.
