Winners are grinners (from left) – Vikram Pawah, the CEO of BMW in Australia, A grade winner Scott Sibson, ladies’s winner Sandra Wang, B grade winner John Palombo and BMW model ambassador Elvis Smylie.
IT’S the most important worldwide novice match on the earth, with greater than 100,000 golfers from practically 50 nations battling it out every year to signify their nation within the BMW Golf Cup.
Our Nationwide Closing, the place 123 Australian and New Zealand amateurs strode the manicured fairways of Hyperlinks Hope Island and the Pines at Sanctuary Cove, came about in mid-October.
And, although the occasion attracts women and men of various handicaps, the Australian Nationwide Closing was dominated by a golfer of uncommon potential.
North Queenslander Scott Sibson, enjoying off a handicap of 1 and the holder after all information at Residence Hill and Ayr, tallied a exceptional 42 stableford factors to take the lads’s A grade trophy.
That meant he had performed the difficult Pines course at Sanctuary Cove, on Queensland’s Gold Coast, in a scarcely plausible five-under-par 67.
It was a rating matched solely by BMW Australian PGA Champion Elvis Smylie, who cruised across the similar course in 66 – a chic spherical that included seven birdies and a single three-putt bogey.
Smylie, a BMW model ambassador, took a break from the DP World Tour to attend the occasion, wherein he performed with BMW sellers and visitors in a separate competitors alongside fellow left-handed professional Nick O’Hern.
It was little greater than a apply spherical for the gifted Smylie. However for Sibson, it meant a visit for him and his accomplice to South Africa for the World Closing, which will probably be held on the fabulous Fancourt Golf Resort in March.
Attending the World Closing will probably be a novel expertise for the golfers who triumphed on the Nationwide Closing in three classes – males’s A and B grade, and within the ladies’s division. Thirty Kiwis who crossed the Tasman for the occasion additionally took half, in search of to signify New Zealand within the World Closing.
The BMW Golf Cup is contested all through the 2 nations – certainly, world wide – by 1000’s of eager golfers who search to succeed in the Nationwide Closing by successful one of many 18-hole regional qualifying tournaments hosted by BMW sellers.
This 12 months’s Nationwide Closing attracted extra rivals than any beforehand held in Australia, courting again to 1988 – with greater than 300 gamers, companions and visitors reserving out the Sanctuary Cove InterContinental resort.
Vikram Pawah, the CEO of BMW in Australia, defined that the occasion was held to not solely promote the BMW model, however to offer prospects with the chance to get pleasure from a once-in-a-lifetime expertise.
All people had some trigger for celebration on the BMW Golf Cup.
Sibson, 55, an accountant from Residence Hill, close to Townsville, mentioned he had been enjoying golf since he was 18, and successful a spot within the BMW World Closing was by far his greatest thrill within the sport.
“An abroad journey? Are you kidding?” he mentioned, as he revealed his rating might have been even higher. “The final gap we performed was the seventeenth, an extended par 5. I used to be on in two and my eagle putt simply lipped out,” he mentioned.
B grade winner Jim Palombo, who scored 45 factors from his 25 handicap, was shocked after receiving his trophy from Smylie. The Gold Coast resident shook his head and mentioned:“This sport teaches you humility. It typically reveals that you just’re inferior to you suppose you’re. And, generally, it reveals that you’re.”
Winner of the ladies’s class was Sydney’s Sandra Wang, a lawyer who took up golf solely three years in the past throughout Covid. She tallied 41 factors.
The appeal of the occasion is that the rivals and their companions are handled like tour stars enjoying in considered one of golf’s main occasions – shuttled from airports to the Sanctuary Cove Intercontinental and wined and dined in luxurious.
Because the golfers tackled two of Australia’s most interesting golf programs, their companions cruised from the Sanctuary Cove marina right down to Southport and again, or had been escorted to Surfers Paradise for a purchasing expedition.
For all of them, attending a BMW Golf Cup Nationwide Closing was an expertise they are going to lengthy keep in mind.
If you want to be part of the 2026 BMW Golf Cup expertise, contact your native BMW supplier. www.bmw.com/en-au/fastlane/dealer-locator.html
