Golf at the Olympic Games.

Paris, 1900

The International Golf Federation (IGF) says the organising committee of the 1900 Paris Games added golf to the programme on 27 May 1899. Charles Sands of the United States won the men's event with rounds of 82 and 85, ahead of Walter Rutherford and David Robertson of Great Britain.

Margaret Abbott of the United States won a nine-hole competition that she believed was a Paris ladies' championship. According to the IGF, her Olympic title was recognised only after her death in 1955. Olympics.com, in a search summary, places the women's event at Compiegne.

The size of the 1900 field is not agreed. One account, summarised in search results, gives 22 golfers from four nations; another, from National Club Golfer as summarised, gives 10 players from the United States and France.

St Louis, 1904

The IGF says the Glen Echo course was built for the St Louis Games, and that Canada's George Lyon beat the favourite, H. Chandler Egan, 3 and 2 in the 36-hole final. NBC Olympics adds that a men's team event was won by the Western Golf Association. A search summary of Olympics.com says the 1904 competition was limited to players from Canada and the United States.

London, 1908: the event that never happened

Golf was planned for London 1908 but cancelled. The IGF attributes this to a dispute over the format that left no British entrants, and says Lyon, the only competitor, declined the offer of a second gold medal. Other summaries put the cancellation down to a lack of entries rather than a format dispute. Either way, golf then disappeared from the Games for more than a century.

The road back

The PGA Tour's account of golf's return describes several failed attempts and one very close vote:

• Around 1992 the PGA Tour, LPGA, USGA, PGA of America and Augusta National tried to add amateur golf to the 1996 Atlanta Games. It did not succeed, and a bid for Beijing 2008 also failed.
• In April 2008 David Fay of the USGA and Peter Dawson of the R&A, as co-chairs of the IGF, sought the PGA Tour's support. The bid team presented to the IOC Executive Board in Lausanne in June 2009.
• At the Executive Board meeting in Berlin in August 2009, golf survived each of the first two rounds of voting by a single vote, and golf and rugby sevens were the two sports recommended.
• On 9 October 2009 the 121st IOC Session in Copenhagen voted golf back in for 2016, by 63 votes to 27 with 10 abstentions.

Rio de Janeiro, 2016

Golf returned at Rio, 112 years after St Louis, on a course designed by Gil Hanse. The IGF says Brazil's Adilson da Silva hit the first tee shot on 11 August 2016.

Medallists since the return

Medal lists below are from NBC Olympics, with the Paris 2024 results also from NBC Olympics' Paris coverage.

A few notes on those results:

• The Tokyo Games were held in 2021 because of COVID-19, and the men's bronze was settled by a seven-way playoff, according to the IGF and NBC Olympics.
• The Paris 2024 events were played at Le Golf National. Scheffler came from four shots back on the final day, according to a search summary of IGF and DP World Tour pages.
• Lydia Ko's Paris gold gave her a medal of each colour across three Games: silver at Rio, bronze at Tokyo and gold at Paris.
• The Paris women's bronze medallist appears as Xiyu Lin in medal listings, but some captions and headlines spell the name differently.

The format

Each individual Olympic event is 72 holes of stroke play with no cut, and a tie for a medal is decided by a sudden-death playoff, according to a search summary of the DP World Tour's Paris 2024 guide.

Los Angeles 2028

The IGF announced on 9 June 2026 that qualifying for Los Angeles 2028 was under way. Its main points:

• 60 women and 60 men qualify through the Olympic Golf Ranking. Players in the top 15 qualify up to four per country per gender; beyond that the limit is two per country. Each of the five Olympic continents is guaranteed a place if needed.
• Women's ranking points count from 8 June 2026 to 5 June 2028, and men's from 22 June 2026 to 19 June 2028.
• A new 16-team mixed event pairs one woman and one man from the same country who have already qualified individually, with teams set by an Olympic Mixed-Team Ranking. NBC Sports and AP reported in April 2025, as summarised in search results, that it will be played over two days, an 18-hole foursomes round followed by an 18-hole four-ball round.
• The venue is The Riviera Country Club. The men's individual event is scheduled for 19 to 22 July 2028, the mixed team event for 23 to 24 July and the women's individual event for 26 to 29 July.

The current Olympic qualifying picture is on the Olympic golf page in our events section.