An Olympic rings set up on the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
getty photographs
PARIS — It’s formally Olympics season in professional golf, however earlier than any photographs are struck at Le Golf Nationwide, there are extra formal celebrations to get to. Just like the Opening Ceremony, scheduled for Friday evening in Paris.
It’s unclear what number of golfers will stroll — or float, reasonably — throughout the celebration held on the Seine River, which snakes by Paris. However we do know for certain that two golfers will maintain the excessive honor of flag-bearer for his or her dwelling international locations.
Fabrizio Zanotti, the 342nd-ranked participant on this planet, will function the male flag-bearer for Paraguay, and can probably do a greater job of it than most each different athlete in France … as a result of he was additionally the flag-bearer for Paraguay on the earlier Olympic Video games, in Tokyo.
Becoming a member of him from the golf beat is Moroccan golfer Ines Laklalech, the 298th-ranked participant on this planet. Laklalech is among the lowest-ranked gamers within the discipline, however is an Olympian nonetheless and considered one of simply 42 athletes competing from Morocco. Contemplating the ladies’s golf competitors doesn’t start till the lads’s comp is completed, Laklalech has arrived in Paris lots early, already sporting the Moroccan pink and forest inexperienced colours from the Olympic Village.
Eager golf followers will recall Gaby Lopez was a flag-bearer for Mexico on the 2020 Olympics, held in Tokyo in the summertime of 2021. With that iteration of the Video games going down within the early phases of the Covid-19 pandemic, Lopez, Zanotti and all of the athletes wore masks. Fortunately this time round, we’ll see much more of their smiles as they symbolize their international locations. (The flag-bearers for Workforce USA are basketball participant LeBron James and tennis star Coco Gauff.)
It’s probably different golfers will participate within the cermony, simply not in a flag-bearing position. Sadly for the ladies’s golf rivals, the Opening Ceremony takes place a full 12 days earlier than their competitors begins. The males’s competitors begins Thursday, Aug. 1.
