The 2022 edition of the WAGC Amateur Golf World Championship will remain unforgettable for Italians. Three years after SABAH Borneo 2019 and after overcoming the Covid emergency, over 40 nations gathered in Kuala Lumpur for the twenty-sixth edition of the World Amateur Golfers Championship.
According to many it is the largest and most prestigious amateur golf tournament in the world. And this year there is an Italian among the winners. After a long qualifying season, each participating country fields teams of five, divided into as many handicap categories.
The reason is simple: we want to give players of any level a chance to participate, from one digits up to over 25 hcp.
WAGC World Championship, results
The World Cup is played both with team classification and with individual classifications.
On this occasion, two separate competitions were created as it was decided to recover the 2020 and 2021 editions of the WAGC, those not played due to the pandemic. Italy presented two squads for the 2021 and 2022 seasons. They also participated in the parallel competition World Amateur Invitational with eight other players with two accompanying and non-playing wives.
Next to them the two captains Valentina De Simoni and Marco Foi, managers of Nextgolf and licensees for Italy of the WAGC. In total, the Italian delegation reached 22 people. Heat, high humidity and pitches prepared for big occasions represented a very demanding challenge.
Despite these objective difficulties, the Italian teams behaved more than worthily. The landslide victory in Flight 2 2021 (cat. 6-10) by Alberto Molteni, 57 years old, from Como stands out in a sensational and unexpected way.
Molteni is the first Italian player to become champion in 26 editions of the World Cup. An overwhelming superiority that of Alberto Molteni, in the lead for all four days. On the last day, the Como man managed the match with great experience, beating the Finnish Poulsen by two strokes and the fierce home player, the Malaysian Khor Jia Zhe, by six strokes.
Great regret for Stefano Remedi, who led for three days in Flight 0-5 and eventually slipped to fourth place. In 2016 Remedi in South Africa was the first Italian to conquer a podium, finishing in third place. Riccardo Ablondi also came close to the podium in Flight 5 with a comeback that however saw him stop in fourth place.
Fifth place overall for Team Italy 2021 and seventeenth for Team Italy 2022. Among the individual 2021 rankings we also point out Fausto Maserati ninth in Flight 3 and Dimitri Pregnolato fourteenth in Flight 4.
