Team USA is the favorite, but who else has the best chance to earn a medal at Le Golf National? We reveal our FRACAS model’s Olympic golf 2024 projections.
Le Golf National is a course with a lot of danger.
The golf events in the 2024 Paris Olympic Games are set to tee off on the French course Thursday with the men’s competition. Le Golf National is in Guyancourt, just southwest of Versailles. It is a frequent stop on both the Challenge Tour and DP World Tour and hosted the 2018 Ryder Cup.
Ten of the holes will have impactful water hazards in the men’s Olympic golf competition and it won’t be uncommon to see a triple bogey or higher on certain holes. The par 5s are the gems of the course, and none more than the third hole. Playing just 558 yards, it’s reachable in two for the whole field but also features hazards on both sides of the fairway. Golfers are expected to score birdie or better almost 60% of the time this week on the third hole.
The field in the Games is small relative compared to a standard weekly event and will not feature a cut. The top four in the field are projected to be gold medalists a collective 60% of the time, led by American 2024 major winners Scottie Scheffler (Masters) and Xander Schauffele (PGA Championship and The Open).
The Favorites
Predictably, Team USA is the favorite with four golfers (Scheffler, Schauffele, Collin Morikawa and Wyndham Clark) in the field and a collective 53% chance to win. Spain is also likely to earn an Olympic medal, though that is almost entirely because of Jon Rahm. Rahm started out 2024 with some of his worst performances in several years, falling outside of the top 20 in worldwide FRACAS. Now recovered from a foot lesion, he returned to form in July with a strong showing at the Open Championship and a win last week on the LIV tour in the U.K.
Shane Lowry and Rory McIlroy are representing Ireland, which has the third-highest chance at a medal. It will be a surprise to some to see Lowry above McIlroy in the projections. Lowry has finishes of T-19, T-9, and sixth in his last three events, the first and last of which were majors and the middle showing an elevated event on the PGA Tour.
Lowry’s up to ninth in our global FRACAS rankings, while McIlroy’s abysmal Open Championship performance pushed him down to 17th.
The Sleepers
South Korea’s Byeong Hun An spent the first half of 2024 playing some of the best golf of his career heading into the Paris 2024 Games. While he didn’t capture a win, he had four top-five finishes before three straight missed cuts (one withdrawal) starting with the U.S. Open in June.
After some recovery time, he finished in a tie for 13th at the Open Championship and is back to being a top-25 player globally. Our model sees Le Golf National as a great golf-course fit for “Ben” An. He has the fifth-highest fit rating in the field. Our model gives him about a 3.5% chance to win a gold medal. He’s listed at around 50-1 in the market, so he’s worth a try.
Representing Chinese Taipei, C.T. Pan has had an up and down 2024. He has six missed cuts in 15 golf tournaments, but also two finishes inside the top three. Our projections give him about a 70-1 chance to top the podium this week, while he’s 170-1 in the market.
Viktor Hovland is the household name from Norway, but it’s Kristoffer Ventura who we want to watch this week. He’s an extreme long shot, understandable given his middling place in the Korn Ferry standings. In his last 10 starts on that tour, he has three missed cuts, but every other finish has been inside the top 25.
Accuracy could prove an issue with all the water on the course, and it shows with his distribution of finishing positions. Of the 60 golfers in the field, Ventura has the 13th-highest variability in finishing position. Of those golfers more variable than him, only two have a higher chance of winning.
What we’re looking for here is a golfer who can show a spike performance and surprise some people. The market gives Ventura a 45-1 shot just at finishing in the top five in the men’s event, but we think that should be closer to 16-1.
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