Spectacular golfing collapses

By THE DATA TEAM

GOLF is above all a game of precision. For professionals competing in the sport’s loftiest events, a poor showing on a single hole often proves fatal. Even the seemingly safest of leads can evaporate in minutes. To mark the start of the PGA Championship today, where 156 of golf’s finest take up their clubs to vie for a hefty $10m (£7.6m) purse—and to show our readers how fickle fate can be—we have built an interactive graphic illustrating the ten greatest flops in men’s major tournaments since 2001. We derived this ranking using EAGLE, our new statistical golf-forecasting system, which uses 450,000 holes’ worth of data and over 2 billion simulations to calculate every player’s chance of victory after every hole in almost every men’s major for the past 15 years.

Meltdowns sometimes start as a trickle, as with Sergio García’s slow surrender after three early birdies in the final round of the 2007 British Open. Other times, they are simply torrents. Jordan Spieth’s quadruple bogey on the 12th hole of this year’s Masters, before which he had a 95.5% chance of triumph, and Adam Scott’s four consecutive bogeys on the last holes of the 2012 British Open, which squandered a seemingly impregnable 98.6% likelihood of victory, were the two sharpest falls.