Challenge Tour alumni start 2016 with a bang
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The European Challenge Tour likes to pride itself on being the best place for golfing talent to develop and if January is anything to go by, 2016 is set to prove that point emphatically.
After Frenchmen Sebastien Gros and Thomas Linard – both Challenge Tour graduates from 2015 – had secured top five finishes in the Alfred Dunhill Championship towards the end of last year, a fellow member of the Class of 2015 took the headlines at the start of the new year.
Brandon Stone, the 22 year old South African who finished 14<sup>th</sup>in last season’s Road to Oman Rankings, took astunning maiden European Tour victoryon home soil at the BMW SA Open hosted by City of Ekurhuleni (see highlights below).
A week later and it was the turn of his good friend and compatriot Haydn Porteous – who beat Stone in a play-off at the Challenge Tour’s season-opening Barclays Kenya Open last April – to enter the winner’s circle, taking atwo shot victory at the Joburg Open(see highlights below).
Porteous narrowly missed out on a European Tour card last season, just dropping out of the top 15 in the Road to Oman Rankings at the NBO Golf Classic Grand Final, but now with a European Tour win to his name the 21 year old has secured his playing rights until the end of next season.
One of the likely inspirations for both young South Africans is their fellow countryman Branden Grace, another former Challenge Tour star, who closed out the month by taking a seventh European Tour win at the Commercial Bank Qatar Masters (see highlights below).
The 27 year old was still playing Challenge Tour only five years ago and is now on the brink of breaking into the top ten of the Official Golf World Ranking.
Almost half of the field in Qatar – 62 players – were former winners on the Challenge Tour, with former Rankings winners Andrew Johnston and Tommy Fleetwood both inside the top ten, as was last year’s Road to Oman Rankings winner Ricardo Gouveia, whose tie for seventh place is the best result of his career.
With three of the four January tournaments on The European Tour being won by former Challenge Tour players, 2016 looks set to be a hugely successful year for Europe’s top developmental tour – and let’s hope the victories keep coming, starting at this week’s Omega Dubai Desert Classic.
And with only six weeks until the2016 Challenge Tour seasonkicks off in Kenya, the new crop of players will no doubt be heartened to see how effective and quick the journey from Challenge Tour contender to European Tour stalwart can be.
