Lichtenhein upbeat on Ladies European Tour

Executive chairman Mark Lichtenhein insists the Ladies European Tour is on the right track despite a lack of events leaving players struggling to make ends meet.

In addition to six tournaments due to be added to the schedule this year, two events bringing men’s and women’s golf together are “in the pipeline” for 2019.

The LET has no tournaments scheduled in June and just one in July, while no player outside the top 50 earned more than £25,000 last season.

“In a world where 99% of all sponsorship money is going into men’s sport it’s hardly surprising that not all women are able to make a career out of professional sport, that’s not just in golf,” Lichtenhein said.

“We had a good start to the season in the southern hemisphere and from July onward we are reasonably strong, it’s just the confidence of the northern European countries that we seem to have lost after the financial crisis and we don’t seem to be able to get that back at a time when ironically 50%of our new players are coming from the five Nordic countries,” he said.

“What we did at the GolfSixes and what we’re doing at Gleneagles in August (a mixed team event in the European Championships), together with two other projects we’ve got in the pipeline for next year bringing men’s and women’s golf together, these are exactly the kind of things we need to be doing.

“We’ve had some tough times and I know people look at the high point at the tip of the boom when we had 28 events on the schedule, but actually our average over the last 10 years has been 23 tournaments.

“We’re three or four below that at the moment but hope to get back to that next year and there’s no reason why we can’t build for the future.”