World’s longest golf hole 20,000km long

The world’s longest golf hole is officially in Mongolia and is just over 20,000km long. Adam Rolston nervelessly rolled in a slippery seven-foot putt on the 18th green of the Mt Bogd Golf Club in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, to bring to an end the strangest hole in golfing history.

Last week Adam Rolston rolled in a seven-foot putt on the 18th green of the Mt Bogd Golf Club in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, to become the first person to complete the hole.

It had taken Rolston 80 days and 20,093 shots – just the 6,093 over par – to complete. He had covered 2,011km, playing through swamps, on frozen rivers and across deserts.

The former Hong Kong rugby international had lost dozens of balls and narrowly avoided a sticky end when his golf cart, which weighed 120kg, got stuck in a swamp and almost fell on top of him.

The whole event began when Rolston met up with a former rugby colleague, Ron Rutland, while in Kenya. They discussed Rutland’s previous charity escapade: a 26,000km cycle through every country in Africa before arriving in Brighton to watch his beloved Springboks face Japan in the 2015 World Cup – a game that ended in humiliation for South Africa.

Rolston came up with the idea of an equivalent golfing challenge and they settled on Mongolia because it was an enormous country with few people, no fences and the largest fairways in the world.

The idea was to finish on the 18th green of the one golf course in the country, and to tee off from the western most point of Mongolia. He calculated it would take him 14,000 shots – and set that as his par.