LPGA stars bracing for 40 mph winds at St. Andrews, whacky Open weather has R&A worried
Strong winds at St. Andrews will challenge the best female players in the world this week during the AIG Women’s Open.
Get ready for some wild weather at the AIG Women’s Open this week.
The tournament returns to the Old Course at St. Andrews, which will host the best female players in the world but also expose them to near-gale-force winds.
Thursday’s first round will see gusts reach 40 miles per hour, perhaps even 45 in the afternoon. The forecast also calls for light rain in the morning but then the sun should pop out in the afternoon—a perfect late summer day in Scotland. More of the same will follow over the next three days, but the only thing sure about the weather at St. Andrews is that it’s always unpredictable.
“You just have to embrace it,” said Lexi Thompson on Wednesday.
“You’re going to get some unlucky breaks with some bounces, and with the weather, you just have to be like, ‘All right, I have it all in my bag, I’m ready, and just have to commit to the shot as much as you can.’ That’s all you can do: just let the wind blow it or the rain take it, and just hope for the best.”
The brutal weather conditions go hand-in-hand with links golf, a style of play that involves hitting the ball low, using the ground to your advantage, and avoiding the gnarly pot bunkers. Green speeds are also slower on links golf courses to combat the high wind speeds that roar off the coast.
The R&A announced on Wednesday that they had slowed the greens even more due to their worries about the weather.
“We have slowed the golf course down quite a bit. We’ve raised the height of the cut on the greens. We’ve put a bit of water on them to help them grow a little bit. We’ve got some pretty good ideas about where we can put the pins to actually protect it as much as we possibly can,” said Martin Slumbers, the Chief Executive of the R&A, on Wednesday.
“We will set it up so the players can play. The good news is the wind is forecast all four days to come from the same quadrant, so we know where to put the pins to give them some room. There is a risk of delays in play [on Thursday], but we’ll deal with that. I think the best players in the world want a bit of a hard challenge. I just hope it doesn’t blow so hard that we can’t play.”
The R&A will sound the siren and suspend play if the wind moves a ball at rest on a green. This week, the R&A has cut the greens to 4.75 millimeters, which are running around 9.6 on the stimpmeter—slow speeds compared to other majors. Hopefully, that will keep players out on the course, but the gale-force winds will undoubtedly challenge the world’s best players. It will also factor into putting speeds and directions.
Nevertheless, this type of golf does not exist in the United States.
“It’s a different creative side to golf where you have to work the ball sometimes more than you’re used to when hitting different shots, bumps-and-runs,” added World No. 1 Nelly Korda.
“It’s just a little bit more creative, and that’s fun to do for me. So I will have a lot of fun with it.”
Korda hails from Florida, where temperatures soar above 90 degrees almost year-round. She prefers to play in warmer weather, where staying loose is easier. Yet, the two-time major winner has a strategy for combating the conditions in Scotland.
“It’s actually staying warm and being able to feel my hands because that’s usually why I have gloves, even when it’s not really necessarily too cold, I stick my hands in the gloves, and I have hand warmers in there,” Korda said.
“It’s staying warm and loose, not tightening up, and being able to commit to your shots.”
That, of course, is easier said than done. But the world’s best players will face a stern test this week at St. Andrews, leaving the golf world entertained.
Jack Milko is a golf staff writer for SB Nation’s Playing Through. Be sure to check out @_PlayingThrough for more golf coverage. You can follow him on Twitter @jack_milko as well.