After a 112-year hiatus, golf won a hard-fought battle to rejoin the Olympic program for 2016, obligating Rio to build at great social, environmental, and economic cost a new golf course in the city's western suburb. Now that the pristine 71-par, 7,350-yard course is completed, however, 17 (to date) of the world's premier golfers, including the top-four men in international rankings, have opted out of the Olympics for various reasons. While this development amounts to egg-on-the-face for the International Golf Federation that lobbied for the sport's inclusion and the IOC that voted to reinstate golf to the Olympic program, the group left holding the bag are the people of Rio, who sacrificed some of region's most valuable land in the Barra da Tijuca neighborhood for a sport that is culturally foreign and financially inaccessible to most Brazilians.
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