Tiger Woods Back In Contention For Olympic Golf Qualification
Tiger Woods moved to No. 6 in the Official World Golf Ranking (OWGR) with his record-tying 82nd PGA Tour title, but he must still climb to get into the 2020 Olympic golf field.
Woods, by winning the Zozo Championship in the Olympic host nation of Japan on Monday, moved from 13th in U.S. Olympic qualifying standings to fifth, according to golf rankings guru Nosferatu on Twitter.
The top four Americans in the top 15 of the OWGR on June 22, 2020, will qualify for the Tokyo Games. If Woods was from any other nation, he would be in the provisional Olympic golf field. But the U.S. will be the toughest team to make, and he is one spot off the bubble at the moment.
Woods is now the No. 4 American in the OWGR, but those rankings are different from the Olympic qualifying standings. The current OWGR includes points from a number of tournaments that will not be part of the June 22, 2020 ranking.
The OWGR is made up of a two-year, rolling window of results, giving the most weight to the most recent results and the strongest fields.
So, even though Woods picked up a bevy of points for his 2018 Tour Championship and 2019 Masters titles, the points from both of those wins will decrease sharply as June 22 approaches. He must continue racking up points in the first half of 2020.
Woods, due largely to his injury history, plays the fewest events of the U.S. Olympic hopefuls, minimizing his opportunities to pick up crucial ranking points. He underwent a fifth left knee surgery in August. Zozo was his first official tournament in two months and his 13th for 2019.
In U.S. Olympic qualifying, he trails Brooks Koepka, Justin Thomas, Patrick Cantlay and Dustin Johnson, according to Nosferatu. Those four golfers have each played at least 18 events in 2019.
Woods has more 2019 wins than Cantlay, but Cantlay has more top-12 finishes in the last year than Woods has total starts. Likewise, neither Thomas nor Johnson won a major in 2019, but both racked up top-10s in events that Woods did not enter.
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