Luiten was one of four golfers from the Netherlands who qualified to compete in the Olympics, along with Darius Van Driel, Anne van Dam and Dewi Weber. The Netherlands’ Olympic committee, however, only opted to send van Dam to the Games as they felt she was the only one who had a realistic chance to win a medal.
Luiten then took the Dutch Olympic committee to court in the Netherlands and won last week, which should have granted him entry into the tournament. The International Golf Federation said that his spot in the 60-man field “had already been reallocated.” The IGF also blamed the International Olympic Committee, which apparently denied a request to increase the field size specifically for Luiten.
Luiten, 38, has won six times on the DP World Tour in his career, most recently at the NBO Oman Open in 2018. He’s currently No. 159 in the Official World Golf Rankings, and he was No. 40 in the Olympic rankings when the Netherlands opted not to send him to Paris.
Scottie Scheffler, Xander Schauffele, Wyndham Clark and Collin Morikawa are the four American golfers who will compete in the Olympics tournament, which starts on Aug. 1 at Le Golf National just outside of Paris. The top 15 golfers in the OWGR after the U.S. Open were eligible to compete, though each country could only send a maximum of four golfers. After that, the rest of the field was made up of the top two eligible golfers per country, so long as that country didn’t already have two golfers inside the top 15.
Schauffele, who won the PGA Championship earlier this season in what was his first major championship win, won the gold medal at the 2020 Olympics in Japan. Rory Sabbatini finished in second, and C.T. Pan — who narrowly earned a spot at the British Open with his finish at the John Deere Classic on Sunday — won the bronze medal in a playoff.
