Despite Iceland’s long and harsh winters, golf is flourishing at a considerable rate. Olafia Kristinsdottir is a product of this nordic island and is destined for future success.
By Lewine Mair
Despite Iceland’s long and harsh winters, golf is flourishing at a considerable rate. LPGA and LET player Olafia Kristinsdottir is a product of this nordic island and is destined for future success.
Golf trophies are probably much the same the world over but, for myself, I picture a series of glorious icicles hanging from the windows of Olafia Kristinsdottir’s home to tell of her assorted victories in Iceland and beyond. She captured the Icelandic Junior Stroke Play championship in 2007 and 2008 besides claiming the top spot in the 2007 Faldo Series’ Icelandic junior event.
Again, since everyone admires a well-rounded golfer, it is worth mentioning that she won an Outstanding Achievement Award for Social Responsibility and Overall Excellence in 2006, as well as the Outstanding Academic Award in both Science and Danish in 2008. It was at the end of last season, when she was playing in what was only her sixth tournament on the LET tour, that Olafia fired a warning shot across the bows when she held the halfway lead in the LET’s pre-Christmas event in Abu Dhabi after opening with rounds of 65 and 66.
That second-place finish in the LPGA’s Qualifying School at Daytona Beach came shortly after. People had thought she might not be ready for so big a test but, in the metaphorical sense at least, she amply demonstrated that she had what it takes to withstand the heat. In everyday life, meantime, she actually prefers cold weather to hot.
...
It was back in the 1990s that John Garner, the former European Ryder Cup player, was summoned to Iceland to help with the development of golf. One of the first pieces of advice that he handed out was that the locals needed to start seeing golf as an all-year round activity rather than one purely for the summer months. Again, he noticed at once that the Icelandic fraternity were as strong as they were hardy and, with this in mind, he encouraged them to work more on their short-games - and their flexibility.
Two sets of statistics worth a mention are as follows: in 1960, there were just four golf courses in Iceland where today there are 65, around 20 of which are 18 holes; still more improbably, Iceland has a greater percentage of its population involved in golf than Scotland, with 60,000 of the 330,000 residents playing to a greater or lesser extent. Everyone, by all accounts, wants their offspring to be a golfer and there is no shortage of encouragement for those who, like Olafia, have their hearts set on making it as tournament professionals.
From now on, Olafia will mostly have to forgo those heavenly weeks when Icelanders can play virtually around the clock. Olafia has experience of local tournaments where she would play 18 or 36 holes by day and head home for supper before returning to the course to practise for as long the mood took her. On days when she was merely going out for fun, she would often do as the tourists at setting out from the 1st tee at 10pm or later.
It was on the strength of her Icelandic results that Olafia won a scholarship to Wake Forest University from which she graduated in economics and entrepreneurship.
The late Arnold Palmer, who made that college the world-famous establishment that it is today, was as interested as anyone in Olafia’s arrival and you can only imagine the fun he would have had in keeping tabs on her progress on the LPGA Tour. Olafia enjoyed three never-to-beforgotten meetings with Palmer himself and, on one of those occasions, Palmer and his wife invited her and a teammate back to their home. Nothing sticks more in her mind from that visit than the great man’s roomful of putters - “I’ve never seen so many putters in my life!” - and a second studio filled with models of the different planes he had flown on his golfing travels.
This is an extract from the latest Women & Golf magazine, out February 10. Never miss an issue, SUBSCRIBE HERE to Women & Golf.
