ADVERTISEMENT
Last Wednesday, during the LIV Golf pro-am in Riyadh, a 13-year-old Saudi girl, handicap 5, showed her talent alongside Chilean Mito Pereira. Because of her age and potential, she may be the first female golfer in the country to reach the amateur women's world ranking in a few years, a ranking that, of course, also has no registered professional representative.
Arabia, situation
The kingdom's ambitious project with this world circuit, which has the golf industry as a driving force for new investments outside of Saudi Arabia, as well as a strategy to promote domestic golf tourism through resorts, with 27 resorts, is not synchronized with a sports policy that permeates the culture of this sport in an extraordinarily young and very enthusiastic nation, especially with football
The mix of fun, concerts and golf, plus the fact that it takes place at night, moved thousands of citizens of the capital to the Riyahd Golf Club, but clearly driven by the recreational aspect.
ADVERTISEMENT
The numbers back up this statement. There is hardly any data on practitioners. Including expatriates, not tourists, according to a 2022 study, in Saudi Arabia about 8,000 golfers play a year in the 14 resorts they have, courses that will almost double by 2030. It only has four professional players and the best of them, Khalid Attieh, plays on the Asian Tour. His best result in the last two seasons, at 29 years old, has been a fifty-seventh place in Indonesia last year. Up to twelve Saudis appear in this classification, but for very isolated appearances on very minor, almost local circuits. Among them is Prince Khalid bin Saud Al Faisal, one of the biggest fans of this sport in the country.
In a nation that, in addition to the LIV, also supports, through the Aramco company, the company with the highest turnover in the world with 160 billion dollars of profits in 2022, several events in women's golf, which are part of the Ladies European Tour, the plans involve creating a quarry with some routes that are still to be built. "I wish this had happened 20 years ago," the member of the royal family told Worldwide Golf hopefully a few years ago.
