Embrace Debate
Slow-play debate rages online after fan times nearly 90-second pre-shot routine of Spanish Open winner Carlota Ciganda
Another week, another slow-play debate in professional golf. Then again, is it really a debate when everyone is in agreement it's a major issue that seems to never get fixed?
Popular LPGA pro Charley Hull had the best idea for fixing slow play yet—taking away players' tour cards. The "ruthless" penalty, as she described it, would never come to fruition. The PGA Tour is attempting to fix it in its own way by shrinking field sizes, a proposal that was recently approved but won't go into effect until 2026. The DP World Tour, to its credit, actually did penalize a player somewhat recently at the BMW Australian PGA Championship, though the player was a rookie, Jacob Skov Olesen, who took 130 seconds to play his second shot on the 10th hole in the first round.
Last week on the Ladies European Tour, it was Carlota Ciganda, a notorious slow-play offender, who drew the ire of a number of folks on social media for taking well over 40 seconds (the allocated time per shot, according to the Rules of Golf) to play a shot on the 15th hole of the final round at the Andalucía Costa del Sol Spanish Open. One Twitter/X user, @Golfingbrock, began timing Ciganda's pre-shot routine once her playing partner's ball had found the 15th green:
To be honest, the bar for pace of play has been set so slow low that this doesn't even seem that bad. But as a repeat offender, Ciganda got folks on the internet plenty riled up with her nearly 90-second routine. The 34-year-old Spaniard was actually penalized two shots for slow play in the second round of the 2023 Amundi Evian Championship, a penalty she refused to accept, ultimately leading to her disqualification from the event.
There was no such penalty on Sunday in her native Spain, where Ciganda went on to win the title in the Ladies European Tour event for the second time, much to Golf Twitter's chagrin:
As Ryan French, AKA Monday Q Info, pointed out, Ciganda's group was put on the clock in the third round and she also received a few bad times. That was it:
Something tells us we'll be discussing this issue again, and again, and again in 2025.