Tipping Point: Rio Olympics fiasco proves AA Gill was right about golf

Just when you think 2016 has made its point, it snatches AA Gill away like a bully coming back to swipe your watch having already emptied your pockets.

The plan this week was to write about golf – and we will, in a bit – but it’s hard to sit here in front of a blank screen without thinking about the years of unwritten words that have just disappeared.

When an actor dies or a musician or a novelist, even the most ardent follower will still only miss their output a few times a year at most.

AA Gill was there week after week, two columns a Sunday, fresh and brilliant and right between the eyes every time.

He did not, it’s fair to say, care for golf, a state of mind that happens to fit the theme of this week’s column perfectly. Take it away, Adrian:

“[Golf] ruins tracts of perfectly nice land and small country hotels. It is, by its very nature, the bottom-line benchmark of tastelessness and naff. In fact, naff is a synonym for golf. It is also overtly racist and class-ridden, groundlessly snobbish and humiliatingly sexist.

“Golf is the standard-bearer and pimp for the worst type of gratuitously wasteful capitalism and conspicuous consumption.

“Golf is wrist-gnawingly tedious to watch and disembowelling to listen to. It makes widows of decent women and de facto orphans of blameless children. And it f**ks up baggage carousels. Golf is a fundamentally stupid game.”

Tut-tutting

For any golfers tut-tutting their disagreement here, let’s take a brisk stroll through the story of Rio de Janeiro’s Olympic golf course.

The site of Justin Rose’s gold medal performance in the summer was in the news again over the weekend after the assets of Rio mayor Eduardo Paes were frozen by a judge alleging that the course developer was allowed to skip by without paying the proper taxes on it.

Judge Leonardo Grandmasson Ferreira Chaves found Mr Paes guilty of “administrative improbity” for exempting real-estate firm Fiori Empreendimentos Imobiliários from paying 1.86 million Brazilian real – about €500,000 – in environmental fees when it built the Olympic golf course.

In a damning verdict published last week, Judge Chaves said the exemption caused “evident damage to the municipal purse”.

Mayor Paes has said he will appeal, of course. But for anyone who has followed the grotty story of the Olympic course from the beginning, the only surprising aspect is that it took so long to discover that there may have been some greasing of the wheel along the way.

For a start, the course was built inside the Marapendi reserve, a protected part of Brazil’s Atlantic forest.

Permission was granted by the city council in late 2012 despite local officials raising concerns that not only had there been no technical studies with regard to the environmental impact but also there had been no public meetings about the rights and wrongs of the project ahead of the decision.

According to the Guardian, the response from Mayor Paes’s office was to say that no environmental impact assessment was required because the city council had approved the decision.

Which smacks ever so slightly of Nixon saying: “When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.”

Onwards, then, to the building of the course. The contract went to the aforementioned Fiori Empreendimentos, a company owned by the billionaire developer Pasquale Mauro. Mauro is an interesting sort, to say the least.

In 2008, the Brazilian ministry of labour found 70 workers living in slave-like conditions on one of his estates. In 2011, the Rio state assembly claimed he had used false documents to obtain property deeds.

And in 2012, a company connected to Mauro donated just under 500,000 Brazilian real to the re-election campaign of Mayor Paes.

That was in October, two months before the decision was passed on the building of the Olympic course.

And here we are four years later and it turns out Mayor Paes just happened to give Mauro’s company a pass on 1.86 million real’s worth of taxes. Ho-hum.

Big whoop

Golf’s fault? Golf’s problem? Depends on how you look at it really. The big whoop about getting golf back into the Olympics was based on spreading the gospel, growing the game and all that jazz.

But four months after Rose mounted the podium, Rio’s Olympic golf course is a ghostly, vacant landscape.

Not only is it too expensive for locals to play, it’s already close to being too expensive to keep open at all.

Progolf, the British company who built it, is spending $82,000 (€78,000) a month of its own money to maintain the course.

There is no guarantee that the company will stay involved into the new year, and if it walks away, the course will almost certainly fall into ruin by early 2017.

So how did we do, dear departed Mr Gill? Golf ruins tracts of perfectly good land? Check. It’s tasteless and naff? Check. Class-ridden, groundlessly snobbish? Check and check.

The standard-bearer and pimp for the worst type of gratuitously wasteful capitalism and conspicuous consumption? Oh, you betcha – check-a-bleedin’-roony.

Great game, golf. But man, it is hard to defend sometimes.