ALFRED DUNHILL LINKS CHAMPIONSHIP

September 30, 2021

Nicolas Colsaerts

Quick Quotes

Q. Quickly, you are the leader at the Dunhill Links and just finished your first round. How was it and how pleased are you with it?

NICOLAS COLSAERTS: Well, I'm very pleased because it's pretty cool to shoot a low score on the Old Course. It's probably my lowest in my career, so that's nice, and especially coming here with basically no golf at all. I think I've only played 18 holes in two weeks. So I basically had no expectations whatsoever.

What's also cool is making two eagles on the two par 5s and finishing up with a birdie on the last, so it's nice to tick all those boxes on such an iconic course.

Q. How was the course today? This morning it was quite wet. How has the course been today?

NICOLAS COLSAERTS: Well, we got pretty lucky because the weather turned for probably the last two hours, two hours and a half. It was not pretty early this morning.

So you kind of think that you're going to have to brace yourself for a long day and all of a sudden everything opens up and you can get a bit more out of the course just because it was blowing less and it got warmer.

So I think all of us today would have been pretty happy with the turn of weather, and yeah, I can only see that a few guys later on this afternoon would start making birdies.

Q. And how important an event is this to you, the Dunhill Links Championship, it's a unique event playing alongside the celebrities and amateurs?

NICOLAS COLSAERTS: Yeah, it's a special event for two reasons, really. The first is that you play unbelievable golf courses in the three of them, St Andrews, Kingsbarns and Carnoustie. You don't really get much better than that.

And then you get to meet pretty interesting people. People that you don't really get to mingle with on a regular basis. I mean, I'm lucky enough to play with Tom Chaplin who is a singer from Keane who I've played with a few times now and he's just a lovely guy to spend six hours on a golf course with. And also playing today with Ronan Keating which is my first time with him and he's also a lovely bloke. Yeah, for those two reasons, I think most of the guys really enjoy coming here, and if the weather is nice, it makes it even better.