OLYMPIC SILVER MEDALLIST RORY SABBATINI TO COMPETE AT THE CZECH MASTERS

He fought to extend his season on the PGA Tour right up to the last moment. In the end, Rory Sabbatini missed out at the Wyndham Championship on Sunday by a single shot, yet he will be playing this week—precisely at the D+D REAL Czech Masters, which starts this Thursday.

Sabbatini was enduring a weak season until he left for Tokyo at the end of July. There he took part in the Olympic tournament and 1 August saw a sensational silver medal being hung around his neck, a medal he won for his new country Slovakia, which he has represented since 2019.

This native of Durban in South Africa almost followed-up on his new-found form by squeezing into the FedEx Cup Playoffs, which starts this week in New Jersey with The Northern Trust tournament.

He was in play for the title after both the second and third rounds at the Wyndham Championship, where he needed to finish at least seventh to break into the 125 best players of the season who would proceed to the Playoffs.

Yet in the end he was a single shot short in the final round with his 68 strokes (-12) giving him an overall score of -13, as players on -14 shared seventh place. Yet every cloud has a silver lining, in this case meaning that his fans will get the chance to see Sabbatini this week at Albatross!

This is because the forty-five-year-old six-times PGA Tour champion is headed to Prague instead of to New Jersey, where together with Henrik Stenson, Danny Willett and Pádraig Harrington, he will be one of the main stars of the seventh year of the only European Tour event in the Czech Republic.

“I have been in contact with Rory through his wife Martina since the Olympics. We were waiting to see how his last chance to advance to the final stage of the PGA Tour would pan out. After the end of the final round we contacted each other again yesterday evening and confirmed Rory’s participation at the Czech Masters,” says Petr Dědek, owner of the Relmost promotional company, which is organising the tournament.

He believes that Rory Sabbatini will be another great attraction for golfing fans, and not only in Slovakia: “This is great news for all sports fans. I believe that many of them will come to see this Slovak golfer who won silver at the recent Olympics.“

The D+D REAL Czech Masters tournament will take place at Albatross from Thursday 19 August to Sunday 22 August. In addition to the foreign stars, all the leading Czechs will be starting, headed by Ondřej Lieser.