Olympic golf final round outdraws every major but The Masters

It appears the Olympic rings are a bigger draw than Jordan Spieth, Jason Day, Rory McIlroy, and Phil Mickelson.

There was much debate about the success and vitality of an Olympic golf tournament coming into Rio 2016, certainly much more when most of the game’s top players began pulling out because of concerns about Zika or just a lack of interest in competing for a gold medal.

With this being the first Olympic golf tournament in our lifetimes, would the chase for the gold medal be enough to carry viewership totals into major championship territory?

According to Sports Media Watch, the answer is yes… at least for the final round.  Sunday afternoon coverage of the Olympic golf tournament drew 8.8 million viewers during a 90 minute simulcast between Golf Channel and NBC.  The Olympic golf tournament did have the benefit of a pretty great matchup between two name players in Henrik Stenson and Justin Rose with American Matt Kuchar making a charge for the bronze on Sunday.  That’s a very impressive number considering it outdraws every major this year (by a decent margin) except for the Masters.  You can see where the Olympic final round rates compared to the other majors in 2016:

Masters final round – 12.4 million
Olympic final round – 8.8 million
US Open final round – 5.4 million
PGA Championship final round – 5.3 million
British Open final round – 4.9 million

There are a couple caveats with this rating.  The 90 minute window on broadcast television certainly helped the Olympic tournament as it centered on the climax of the final holes.  A longer broadcast window on NBC probably would have seen that number decrease somewhat.  Additionally, if you look at just the longer window on Golf Channel, average viewership was only 1.6 million in the afternoon and 556,000 in the morning session.  The other rounds of the tournament televised on Golf Channel didn’t quite reach the same heights either.  For the first round, the viewership totals placed it somewhere between a major championship and this week’s John Deere Classic.  In the long term, that’s probably an appropriate place for the Olympics on the golf calendar with all things considered.

So what does it all mean?  From a competition standpoint, the tournament was a success with some of the top golfers in the world who did make the trip to Rio in a close battle for medals.  It’s exactly what the tournament needs to survive well into the future and everyone who did go to Rio had great things to say about the experience.  Likewise, NBC can be very happy with the final round viewership on Sunday, but it’s probably more to do with the draw of the Olympics itself versus anything else.  It may not have been enough for some golfers, but it was enough for television viewers.