The European Tour will come to the mixed event party with the news that the Scandinavian Mixed Hosted by Henrik & Annika has been added to next year’s calendar.
Next June 78 players from the European Tour and the Ladies European Tours will compete for one prize fund at Bro Hof Slott in Stockholm.
Delighted to announce this exciting news for golf and the @europeantour!
A mixed event 👍🏻
One prize fund 💶
The same golf course ⛳
Competing for one trophy 🏆#ScandinavianMixed pic.twitter.com/3mj6tJBOTQ— Henrik Stenson (@henrikstenson) October 14, 2019
Here are some key takeaways…
• The beauty of this is maybe in its simplicity. We’ve had three different tours playing off different tees in Jordan (pictured), a Challenge Tour event in Northern Ireland which included 80 women professionals and amateurs, the Vic Open where the men and women played for the same prize money but in different competitions and GolfSixes which seemed to involve every format in the game.
Then there’s Morocco which had two separate events in the same city but at different courses.
This is one tournament with one winner on one course.
• The prize fund is €1.5m for the field and the tournament will offer world ranking, order of merit and Ryder Cup points. To put that into some sort of context that is the same pot as the recent Spanish Open on the men’s tour. The women’s event had a prize fund of €300,000.
• Carlota Ciganda won €45,000 for her win in Spain while Carly Booth picked up €19,200 for capturing the Czech Ladies Open – the winner in Sweden can expect to land a first prize of around €250,000 going by the Spanish Open funds.
• The date, June 11-14, is the week before the men’s US Open which will lead to the usual howls of outrage over the depth of the field in Sweden until we remember quite how few Europeans qualify for the USGA showpiece.
On the PGA Tour it will be up against the Canadian Open so it should get plenty of column inches and with Stenson confirmed to play for the next three years it gives the tournament, which will rotate venues in 2021 and 2022, plenty of kudos while Sorenstam will take part in the tournament pro-ams.
• The women haven’t had an LET event in Sweden since the Helsingborg Open in 2015. Before that Sorenstam hosted the Scandinavian TPC from 1996-2008, an event she won six time before it was discontinued. Given how many incredible female players the country has produced this is good news for this alone.
• What we don’t know yet is the length of the course that the men and the women will both face and this will be one of the big talking points in the build-up to the main event.
For interest this is how the Jordan Mixed Open was set up:
Challenge Tour players – 7,100 yards
Staysure Tour players – 6,600 yards
Ladies European Tour players – 6,140 yards
• The real beauty of this event are the tournament hosts who are the perfect faces and voices to push this type of event. Both major winners and both hugely popular this doesn’t smack of anything overly gimmicky.
What might have been nice would have been to call it the Scandinavian Mixed Hosted by Annika and Henrik?
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