Following his victory at the Spanish Open, ngel Hidalgo has climbed 236 positions in the world rankings, moving from 398th to 162nd, while Jon Rahm, a member of the LIV Golf circuit, has moved up two places to thirteenth.
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Hidalgo, results
The 26-year-old Spanish golfer completed a sensational tournament in Madrid and achieved his first victory on the European circuit on the grass of the Club de Campo. This triumph has allowed him to add 25,061 points and rise exponentially in the world ranking to 162nd place, the highest of his career, and to secure his European circuit card for the next two seasons.
Rahm, second in the Spanish Open, also adds points, in his case 15,036, which means he rises two positions to thirteenth before playing the Alfred Dunhill, in Saint Andrews (Scotland). The top five spots in the world rankings remain intact with American Scottie Scheffler in first place, followed by his compatriot Xander Schauffele, Northern Ireland's Rory McIlroy, American Collin Morikawa and Swede Ludvig Aberg.
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The impetus for the creation of the Official World Golf Rankings came from the tournament committee of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews, which in the 1980s realised that its system of sending out invitations to the British Open by analysing each tour individually was leading to the exclusion of more and more top players because they were splitting their commitments across multiple tours, and from the influential sports manager Mark McCormack, who became the first chairman of the international committee that oversees the creation of the rankings.
The system used to develop the rankings was based on that of McCormack's World Golf Rankings, which had previously been published in his World of Professional Golf Annual from 1968 to 1985, which was an unofficial ranking and was not used for other purposes such as selecting players to be invited to tournaments.
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The first rankings were published prior to the 1986 edition of The Masters. The top six players were: Bernhard Langer, Severiano Ballesteros, Sandy Lyle, Tom Watson, Mark O'Meara and Greg Norman. The top three were European players, but thirty-one of the top fifty were American.
Over the years, the ranking method has changed a lot. Initially, the ranking was calculated over a three-year period, with the current year's score multiplied by four, the previous year's score multiplied by two and the two-year score left unchanged.
The ranking was drawn up with the total score and the total points rounded to the nearest whole number. All tournaments recognized by the professional tours and some of the invitational tournaments were classified into categories, ranging from "major tournaments" (where the winner received 50 points) to "other tournaments" (where the winner received a minimum of 8 points).
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In each tournament, the other ranked players also received points proportionally to their placement, starting with the second-placed player who received 60% of the points due to the winner.
