The 145th Open Championship will live long in the memory as Henrik Stenson – winner of the Challenge Tour Rankings in 2000 – prevailed in an epic head-to-head with Phil Mickelson to become Sweden’s first male Major Champion at Royal Troon.
The 40 year old smashed records all around the Ayrshire course as he became the sixth Challenge Tour alumnus to taste Major success, though few have ever done so in such dramatic style.
Not only did his final round 63 match the best round in Major Championship history but his 20 under par 264 aggregate score was the lowest ever total in one of golf’s four premier events, and was a scarcely believable 14 shots ahead of third placed JB Holmes.
Mickelson – whose own Challenge Tour record reads played one, won one after his victory in the 1993 Tournoi Perrier de Paris – went blow for blow with the Swede but ultimately had to settle for second place, three shots behind the champion.
Stenson followed Michael Campbell, Trevor Immelman, Louis Oosthuizen, Martin Kaymer and Justin Rose as Challenge Tour alumni to win a Major and followed it up by taking silver at the Olympics – behind Rose – and winning the Race to Dubai for the second time in his career to complete a momentous 2016.
While Stenson was the headline act in the Majors this year, he was not the only player with Challenge Tour history to shine on the global stage.
Back in April, Matthew Fitzpatrick and Søren Kjeldsen both secured top ten finishes in the Masters Tournament, where Romain Langasque, who finished ninth on this year’s Road to Oman, finished tied 39th as an amateur, closing with a magnificent 68.
Langasque had previously finished runner-up in the Challenge Tour’s season-opening Barclays Kenya Open behind Sebastian Soderberg, who came through a five man, five hole play-off at Walton Heath to earn a Major debut of his own at the U.S. Open at Oakmont in June.
While Dustin Johnson took victory, Branden Grace, who played four seasons on the Challenge Tour, finished in the top five for the second successive year to demonstrate once again his own ability, and the quality of the Challenge Tour alumni.
The South African took another top five in the US PGA Championship, where he was one of five former Challenge Tour players in the top ten, alongside Brooks Koepka in a tie for fourth and ahead of Kaymer and Stenson, who shared seventh place at Baltrusol Golf Club, and Tyrrell Hatton, who was tied tenth in the final Major of the year.
And even if The Open was all about Stenson, there were further Challenge Tour success stories to be found, not only in the eight active players on the Road to Oman who qualified but also on the leaderboard, where 2013 graduate Hatton, 2014 Rankings winner Andrew Johnston and 1997 graduate Kjeldsen all finished in the top ten.
Ultimately this all means that 2016 was another year of Major success for the Challenge Tour, with a notable victory and 11 further top tens for its alumni, plus ten players from the 2016 Road to Oman participating across three of the four tournaments.
