The Barrika native is dejected by his fifth place after being four strokes ahead on hole 10
PARIS, Aug. 4 (by EUROPA PRESS special correspondent Gaspar Díez) –
Spanish golfer Jon Rahm said he does not know the reasons and that it is “painful” not to have made it onto the podium at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, after the first ten holes after which he was leading by 4 strokes and collapsing in the last few holes to finish in an insufficient, for him, fifth place.
“I don’t know when I last thought fifth place was a good thing, but today I certainly didn’t. It’s painful. Given how well I played, I basically had no chance at the end. It’s hard to think about it still. I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s painful,” he said a few metres from the putting green at Le Golf National.
In that area, where former Spanish basketball player and IOC member Pau Gasol was photographed with national fans and where hours earlier he had barely hit six or seven putts before heading to hole one, Rahm expressed, on the verge of tears, his disappointment at having left Paris without a medal.
“I’ve been lucky enough to represent Spain many times, including on this field, where we won a bronze medal at the European Under-16s. I’ve managed to win several things and being able to do so as a professional would have been incredible. After having it in my hands, not achieving anything, leaving empty-handed, is painful, it’s disappointing,” she commented.
The winner of the 2023 Augusta Masters, who is out of the Tokyo 2020 Games due to the pandemic due to Covid, admitted that he is “more annoyed” to disappoint the Spanish public, who have supported him so much these four days on the same course where he was a hero in Europe’s triumph at the 2018 Ryder Cup. “They have been incredible on and off the course. They have supported me a lot and I wanted to give them that joy, but it has not been possible,” he said.
“IT WILL BE HARD FOR ME TO OVERCOME”
Neither the eleventh nor the twelfth hole. The reason for his downfall, explained the Basque, was his short game. “I’ve missed short putts all week. It hasn’t been my best week on the greens. That nine iron went five metres too long because of the wind that we didn’t feel on the tee. The twelfth was not bad either,” he said.
The problem was the third shot on the fourteenth hole, an approach in the upper part of the green that almost returned to its place of origin in an almost boomerang effect, and then he missed again with the putt, a club that he used with varying success in Paris.
“I can’t go back to where I went. There are things that you can’t do on this course and, apart from hitting into the water, going left on the fourteenth is one of them and it cost me two strokes. If I make par there, even if it’s a par five, I have a chance for the last four holes,” he explained.
If he birdied the fifteenth and sixteenth, par fours and three “affordable” ones, he would have a chance of a podium finish at the eighteenth. “I missed the fifteenth, I got the sixteenth, but even so I was a bit far away. I tried to fight until the end, even if it was for a silver medal, but it wasn’t to be,” he lamented.
Rahm looks into the distance in search of those reasons that escape logic. “It’s very hard and difficult to explain, honestly. You learn from everything, right? But making the effort to think about what happened on each hole in order to learn is going to hurt a lot. So it’s going to cost me a lot more than it has cost me in other times to overcome what happened today,” he stressed.
For the spectator it was a “good day” with very low rounds, especially for the world number one and new Olympic champion, Scottie Scheffler, with 9 under par and to whom Rahm gave up the green jacket of the Augusta Masters this year.
“It was a good day for golf, but personally painful. Did I see myself with the gold? No, in golf you can’t get ahead of yourself that much. You can’t say that it’s over, because on this course, especially in the last four holes, things can change a lot,” said the player from Barrika.
With 28 years on his license, and, above all, because of the tantrum that still broke him, Rahm prefers not to think about Los Angeles 2028 yet. “Listen, we’re thinking too much. It’s four years. My goal is to be there again, on another course that I love and where I’ve won. But there’s a lot ahead and I’d like to achieve things before I get to those Olympics,” he said under the same sun where, just a few hours earlier, he saw himself with the Olympic gold hanging around his neck, and it vanished: “Yes, well. Yes, many positives, but it’s going to be hard for me to think about them now. But the week has been incredible.”