This Friday, the International Olympic Committee will decide which sport - golf or rugby - to add to the 2016 Games.

The prospect of Olympic golf raised some controversy. To some, golf is the very image of exclusivity: wealthy businessmen and politicians hitting a white ball around hectares of land that may have more beneficial uses to society - say, a nature preserve or low-income housing.

One could argue that golf, as a pastime where vast resources are reserved for a privileged few, is unethical. Or, as President Hugo Chavez called it in an August television broadcast, a “bourgeois sport.”

“There are sports and there are sports,” Mr. Chavez said, according to the Simon Romero of The New York Times. “Do you mean to tell me this is a people’s sport? It is not.”

Mr. Chavez cited the example of a course in Maracay; he thought 30 hectares set aside for golf could be better used to build housing for poor people living in the city’s many slums. Officials have moved to shut down that golf course and another, Mr. Romero wrote.

Golf courses can also encroach on natural habitats. In Scotland, the American real estate developer Donald Trump drew the ire of environmentalists when he proposed a 566-hectare, $1.58 billion golf resort, which would use part of a nature reserve and a stretch of sand dunes. The Scottish government approved the plan last November.

“It appears that the desires of one high-profile overseas investor who refused to compromise one inch have been allowed to override the legal protection of this important site,” said the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds after the decision, according to The Times. “We and thousands of other objectors consider this is too high a price to pay for the claimed economic benefits from this development.”

Randy Cohen, who writes an ethics column for The Times, wrote on a Times blog that compared with other sports, the culture of golf is “more redolent of a gated community than amiable international populism.” He argued that golf went against the unifying spirit of the Olympics.

Frank Thomas, a former technical director of the United States Golf Association, argued in The Times’s Room for Debate blog that golf had plenty of merit as an Olympic sport. “There is a better balance between one’s physical and mental skills in golf than in almost any other sport in the Olympics,” he wrote.

He said the Olympics could help promote it to the masses.

“What is the objective and motivation for doing this?” he wrote. “Is it to: enhance the entertainment value of the Olympics; better expose golf to the world; be more inclusive of athletes of different race and gender; determine which nation has the best golf teams rather than individual golfers; allow golf to be included in the distribution of government funds afforded all Olympic sports and thus help foster the growth of the game internationally especially in emerging nations?

“A response might be,” he continued, “all of the above.”


To some, golf is the very image of exclusivity (not to mention questionable fashion choices), but others say it deserves to be an Olympic sport.


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