While struggling through a round of golf this weekend, I wondered: why isn’t golf an Olympic sport?
It turns out that at one time golf was Olympian, in 1900 in Paris and 1904 in Saint Louis (those games both coincided with world’s fairs in those cities). In 1904 Canadian George Lyon won the gold medal over Chicagoan Henry C. Egan. In the 1904 games the United States and Canada were the only competitors in golf. Maybe that’s why it was dropped. Not international enough.
It also turns out that golf will be reinstated as an Olympic sport for the 2016 games in Rio de Janeiro. (What’s “fore!” in Portuguese?)