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Ever since Justin Rose left Rio de Janeiro with an Olympic gold medal in 2016, people have been asking Jamie Spence, the British team leader, for a few tips ahead of this year’s games in Tokyo.
Highly commended leader though he was, Spence is far too honest ever to have taken any of the credit for Rose’s heroics. “What Justin did was all down to Justin,” he said. “While the rest of us stayed in the Olympic Village, he used his own money to rent a house five minutes from the golf course and it made sense.” (Spence was not about to reveal how much Rose would have paid for the property. Suffice to say that £100,000 was probably about right in that any rental arrangement had to be for the duration.)
Spence had no trouble in recognising that the “village experience” was not the optimum environment for a professional golfer. “Plenty of the athletes,” he explained, “want to immerse themselves in the entire Olympic experience and of course that’s understandable. Justin took his family to watch the gymnastics but, when it came to the golf, he was in at the business end. All the leading figures in Rio were talking about ‘marginal gains,’ and that’s where he would have scored. He could get the sleep he needed; he could eat what and when he wanted because he had his own chef to hand, and he had space and time to himself.”
Spence added that it was probably no coincidence that Henrik Stenson, who won silver, played things the same way. Again, though he was not aware of it, both Inbee Park and Lydia Ko, who finished first and second among the women, made their own arrangements.
“In an ideal world,” continued Spence, “the British team would have rented a home where Justin had his, especially when the bus ride to and from the course and the village was taking up to an hour each way because of the security measures in force.”
As to where the funding would have come from, Spence said that the British Golf Association, an association invented for the game’s return to the Olympics, were there for that purpose. The trouble was that three of the four parties making up that new union – Scottish Golf, England Golf and Wales Golf – were amateur bodies struggling to get by on their members’ affiliation fees.
After a bit of a battle, the Professional Golfers’ Association, the fourth of the parties involved, agreed to cover club-class upgrades for the flights to and from Rio. After all, the numbers involved were minuscule as against those associated with a Ryder Cup sortie. Aside from the players (Rose, Danny Willett, Catriona Matthew and Charley Hull) and their caddies, the only other personnel were Spence and Nigel Tilley, both of whom were there on a voluntary basis, Spence as the team leader and Tilley as the physiotherapist.
“Nigel and myself felt hugely honoured to have been chosen for our respective positions but, to be ruthlessly honest, we just muddled along,” Spence said.
“So who was in charge; to whom did it all matter?” came GGP’s next question.
There was a momentary pause at this point.
“No-one really. … Michael Hay, from the British Olympic Association, was terrific. He arranged our accommodation and gave ourselves and Johanna Konta, the tennis player, the penthouse suite in our accommodation block. We really appreciated what he did, but he was not there to babysit the golfers.”
“The crowds will be huge this year. Rory (McIlroy)’s going to be there and so might Tiger (Woods). They will have seen what a gold medal has done for Justin.”
Jamie Spence
Virtually all the decisions were in Spence’s hands. Going back to the subject of Rose’s request to rent a house, Spence sourced an appropriate property and did not hesitate to give his blessing to the arrangement. “I just looked at it from the point of view of what I would have wanted if I’d been playing,” he said.
This past winner of the European Masters spent a year gathering all the information needed for administration purposes and player clothing sizes. The latter was an unenviable task in that only Hull was available to go to the “Olympic kitting-out” sessions in Birmingham, what with Rose and Willett at the Open and Matthew back home in Scotland with her family after a stint in America.
The Olympic golf bags presented another problem. All of the players would have wanted a personalised bag to commemorate their involvement in golf’s return to the games but, to Spence’s horror, there were no names on the bags when they arrived at his door.
Luckily, he found a solution. He rang an old friend in Shaun Udal, a former England cricketer who owned a printing company, and Udal did the job for nothing.
“It was just frustrating not to be able to do things as they should be done,” said Spence. “I know that a lot of players were apathetic about going to Rio, some because of the Zika virus and others because they didn’t see the Olympics as mattering as much as a major. But everyone needs to be aware that all that is changing now. The crowds will be huge this year. Rory (McIlroy)’s going to be there and so might Tiger (Woods). They will have seen what a gold medal has done for Justin.
“With three of the four majors being held in America and golf a world game, that medal is only going to mean more and more in the years to come. The Olympics will be seen as the pinnacle and what so frustrates me is how, when we are so well-placed in the UK for world-class golfers, we are not grabbing this opportunity with both hands.”
When it comes to sorting out the vexed question of how the British should be tackling the traditionally amateur experience, Spence believes that officialdom need to get together to decide on the best approach. “The fact that we have goodness knows how many different golfing associations in the UK doesn’t make things any easier. If we were like so many of the other nations in having a single federation, that one body would take overall responsibility. Justin won and we should all be proud of what he did but, as a British team we could and should be seen to be doing things better.”
Spence was offered the team leadership role for a second time in Japan and went so far as to go on the first reconnaissance trip. Interesting trip though that was, he considered the distance between the course and the village, along with some of the other arrangements-in-the-making, and decided that he was not prepared to go through it all again. “I know I will regret not being there when the time comes but it was just too much to volunteer for,” he said.
Nigel Edwards, the former Walker Cup player and captain, will be the new team leader and Spence wishes him all the luck in the world.
“Nigel’s a great guy,” he says. “I’ve given him a few pointers, but I fear that he’s going to have his work cut out.”
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