BMW PGA Championship moves to September
Published:
The European Tour have announced that their flagship event, the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth, will move to September in 2019
The news comes as no surprise following the confirmation that the PGA Championship will take up a new place in May to become the second major of the year – which would undoubtedly have caused uncertainty about who would come to play at Wentworth in the same period.
With the Rolex Series being launched just this year, it makes sense for the European Tour to move the Championship in to a different month altogether – although it now throws about questions of whether it would in turn impact the British Masters.
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The move comes following news announced earlier today that the 2019 US PGA Championship will move from its traditional August date into May, with The Players Championship on the PGA Tour moving from May to March.
There is yet to be a formal announcement of the 2019 dates for the BMW PGA Championship, but it will continue to be played at Wentworth Club from May 24-27, 2018, before moving to September for its 65th anniversary edition the following year.
Keith Pelley, Chief Executive of the European Tour, said: “Significant changes to the global golfing calendar have given us the opportunity to move the BMW PGA Championship to a more favourable date from 2019 onwards.
“Wentworth Club is an iconic location in the realm of British sport and the BMW PGA Championship is always hugely popular with the public as was seen in May when it launched our Rolex Series with 110,000 spectators in attendance over the course of the week.
“This is a new chapter for the event but we expect similar interest in the autumn, as was shown historically by the World Match Play Championship when it was played at Wentworth Club at that time of the year.”
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The specific date of the 2019 BMW PGA Championship will be released in due course but it will be central to a strong and robust end of season schedule on the European Tour. The BMW PGA Championship was the first of eight Rolex Series events to be played on the European Tour’s International Schedule in 2017, all of which are part of the Race to Dubai. Sweden’s Alex Noren claimed the title in May, overturning a seven shot deficit with a stunning final round of 62 to win by two strokes over the West Course, which had undergone a multi-million pound revamp in the period between the 2016 and 2017 Championships. |
