Race for Olympic qualification heats up

Hollywood couldn’t have scripted a better ending to the pandemic-delayed 2020 Olympic Games than Hideki Matsuyama battling Xander Schauffele down the stretch for gold medal at Japan’s Kasumigaseki Country Club.

Granted, the host nation’s favourite son — and reigning Masters champion — couldn’t quite take down the American. But golf fans in Japan also had a vested interest in Schauffele, whose grandparents moved there from Taiwan when his mother, Ping Yi, was two years old.

And the best thing? Schauffele was able to show them the gold medal before he returned to the United States.

“It’s pretty hard to impress someone who’s almost 90 years old and has been on this planet for a long time,” he later said.

“They’ve seen a lot of things, and to see my grandpa and my grandma’s reaction when I pull out this gold medal, it really was surprising. It shocked me.”

The 2024…