#5 - JRL 7283
The Observer (UK)
August 10, 2003
Golf
Russian open
Russia on course where Lenin feared to tread
The European Tour makes its first stop on Moscow's only 18-hole course this week
Kevin O'Flynn

As the cream of Europe's golfers head off to Rochester, New York, for the USPGA championship, those left behind will be in Russia, a country with fewer golf holes than Kent. The Russian Open makes its debut on the European Tour at the Moscow Country Club, the only full-size golf course in the biggest country in the world.

European Tour director Alain de Soultrait has called the Moscow Country Club one of the best courses in Europe, but it has until now been confined to the Challenge Tour. But with prize money boosted to €400,000 (£281,000), the holes on the par 72 suitably lengthened and a new chipping green, Russian golf will make its debut into the top tier of the golfing world.

Before 1989, Russia and golf had only met in passing. Tsar Nicholas II's brother, Prince Mikhail, built France's first golf course near Cannes in 1891, while Lenin once played golf, if only in fiction when PG Wodehouse wrote of him in 1922 playing in the short story The Clicking of Cuthbert .

Lenin's fictional dalliance notwithstanding, golf was officially considered the most dubious of bourgeois sports in Soviet times. It only finally arrived during glasnost when Swedish ice-hockey player Sven Johannsson convinced authorities to let him build a nine-hole course in Moscow in 1989, close to where many Western embassies were located.

Today, if you look at the statistics, Russian golf looks to be barely alive. There are only 30 holes and six pitch and putt courses in the whole of the country. The 5,000 spectators expected at the Russian Open are about three times the number of people who actually play golf in Russia.

With a $20,000 (£12,500) a year membership fee, courses are dominated by middle-aged Western businessman and the new Russian elite. (When the club first opened, the Russians had to be tactfully told not to park their Mercedes Benzes and BMWs on the course.)

But local experts believe the sport could be on the verge of a boom the like of which local tennis experienced in the 1990s and which created the conveyor belt of Russian stars that are now flooding the women's game.

'There are some great young players coming through,' said Albina Byzer, the deputy editor of Russian golf magazine GSN .

There is a visible thirst for the game. The Russian golf association's president, Konstantin Kozhevnikov, boasts he will build 500 golf courses in the next 15 years. The country's two golf magazines get letters from parts of Russia not within hundreds of miles of a course.

Nick Faldo has designed a $15m course that is being built near the main airport while Jack Nicklaus has designed another course, to be built at a so far secret location, which is rumoured to be a personal course for a certain oligarch and his friends. A gigantic indoor golf centre, which will provide practice for the five months of a year when golf courses are closed due to the harsh winter, has opened in Moscow.

Yevgeny Kafelnikov, who helped provide the impetus for interest in tennis by becoming the first Russian to win a major at the French Open in 1996, is being used to boost the game and has been made vice president of the Russian Golf Association.

More importantly, golf schools have been providing free lessons to local children. Although the five Russians taking part in the Russian Open, including former Russian Open winner Konstantin Lifanov are unlikely to be in the lead come Sunday, the young could be there in a few years.