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BRISBANE, Australia — Eight years after turning down his first alternative, a still-regretful Jason Day will lastly make it to an Olympics as a part of an Australian golf staff that features a brother-and-sister mixture for the Paris Video games.
Day was ranked No. 1 in 2016 when he determined to not play on the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, saying he was involved about going to Brazil whereas the mosquito-borne Zika virus spreading.
“The rationale for my determination is my issues concerning the potential transmission of the Zika virus and the potential dangers that it would current to my spouse’s future pregnancies and to future members of our household,” Day mentioned on the time, whereas spurning an opportunity to compete in Rio.
He is sorry he made that alternative.
“I feel selfishly I decided on my schedule and the way I used to be feeling on the time,” Day mentioned in a phone convention Friday. “I used to be emotionally and bodily burned out.
“There was rather a lot on my plate. I used to be No. 1 on this planet. You be taught from earlier errors … however wanting again on it, I ought to have gone. Lots of people would kill for an opportunity to characterize their nation.”
The Australian Olympic Committee on Friday mentioned Min Woo Lee would be part of Day on the lads’s staff and Minjee Lee and Hannah Inexperienced would make up the ladies’s staff.
The Lees are siblings and had been each born in Perth, Western Australia. Minjee is 28 and Min Woo is 25. Their dad and mom, Soonam and Clara Lee, migrated from South Korea to Australia within the early Nineteen Nineties.
Minjee Lee will turn out to be the primary Australian golfer to compete at three Olympics, Inexperienced returns for her second Video games whereas Min Woo Lee will be part of Day in making his Olympic debut.
The 4 gamers all certified by advantage of their Worldwide Golf Federation Olympic rating on the finish of a two-year rating interval. Inexperienced and Minjee Lee completed the interval ranked seventh and eleventh. Day and Min Woo are Australia’s highest-ranked male golfers at twenty seventh and thirty sixth respectively.
Inexperienced matched Australia’s finest Olympic golf end with a tie for fifth at Tokyo three years in the past and has received two LPGA Tour occasions this yr. Minjee Lee has 10 profession LPGA wins.
Day has 13 profession PGA Tour wins together with a significant — the 2015 PGA Championship. Min Woo Lee is the reigning Australian PGA champion and achieved a career-best world rating of No. 31 in 2024.
Day mentioned his enduring Olympic recollections had been of the sturdy swim groups from Australia when he was nonetheless in school in Queensland state close to Brisbane. And observe star Cathy Freeman’s gold medal within the 400-meter race on the Sydney Video games in 2000, an iconic Australian sporting second.
“As a child rising up, I by no means considered the Olympics as a result of golf solely grew to become a sport just lately,” Day mentioned. “However in the beginning of the yr it was on my checklist to characterize Australia, so it is good to perform that.”
Though golf featured in just a few Olympics within the early twentieth century — together with at Paris within the second model of the Video games in 1900 — it returned greater than a 100 years later at Rio.
This yr’s Olympic event will likely be performed at Le Golf Nationwide at Guyancourt close to Paris. The boys compete from Aug. 1-4 and the ladies from Aug. 7-10.
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