The SDC Championship 2023, a tournament valid for the DP World Tour, got underway today on the St. Francis Links, Eastern Cape, South Africa. In a first round that saw all the most popular athletes in great difficulty to dominate it was the great balance, forming a leaderboard that sees many players within a few points.
SDC Championship 2023, results
The Frenchman David Ravetto and the Norwegian Kristian Krogh Johannesen stood out in this balance. The two managed to finish the round in 67 shots reaching the score of -5. Ravetto gets there with six birdies and a single bogey on hole 7, while Johannesen has five birdies on a still bogey-free card.
The Scotsman Connor Syme remains in the wake, closing with -4, followed by a large group of players with a score of -3 made up of Joost Luiten, Julien Brun, Martin Simonsen, Sean Cronje and Nick Bachem. Further back some of the most awaited players such as Adri Arnaus, Antoine Rozner and Oliver Bekker, together in 31st place, while Adrian Otaegui did even worse, only 86th after 18 holes.
South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (in Afrikaans Republiek van Suid-Afrika; in English Republic of South Africa), is an independent state in southern Africa. It overlooks the Atlantic Ocean to the west and the Indian Ocean to the east.
Its territory occupies the southern tip of Africa and consequently hosts the southernmost geographical point of the continent, Cape Agulhas, which conventionally marks the border line between the two oceans on which the country overlooks.
The land borders are, however, from west to east, with Namibia (north-west), Botswana and Zimbabwe (north), Mozambique (north-east) and eSwatini (east), while entirely included in its territory is the enclave of Lesotho. Also belonging to South Africa are the Prince Edward Islands, which are located 1770 km southeast of Port Elizabeth, about half the distance between the continent and Antarctica.
It is a culturally and ethnically diverse state: 12 official languages are spoken in it, two of which are of European origin, English, brought there by the British colonists, and Afrikaans, an African evolution of the language of the Dutch colonists of the seventeenth century who they arrived following the discovery of the southern lands by the Portuguese.
For most of the twentieth century, after formal independence from the United Kingdom, the policy of the African state was marked by a rigid racial segregation called apartheid (Afrikaans for “separation”) due to which, due to the continuous violations of human rights that this line of conduct entailed (the most internationally known of which was the 27-year prison sentence of activist Nelson Mandela), the country was subject to a series of international sanctions, up to the sporting boycott of South Africa from any sporting competition and from exclusion from the Olympics.
The situation normalized with the gradual desegregation at the end of the century and the subsequent election of Nelson Mandela as president, which prompted the adoption of a new constitution and also a new national flag, both adopted in 1994.
