Police escorts help Garcia and Herbert get to Royal St George’s after traffic issues

Sergio Garcia and Lucas Herbert needed police escorts to get to Royal St George's after getting caught up in traffic ahead of their first rounds at the149thopenchampionship.

The Spaniard teed off at 10.31am but after shooting a two-under 68 revealed he required a little extra help to get to the course and arrived an hour later than he wanted due to congestion in Sandwich.

"I'm even happier after how the morning started," said the 2017 Masters champion. "Because of terrible traffic coming in, even though I left the house with plenty of time, I needed a little bit of help from a couple very nice English policemen on the bikes to get me here with only about 35, 40 minutes to tee off, when usually I like to be here around an hour and a half (before).

"We just got stuck. We couldn't move and thankfully they helped us a bit and got us here in time. I was able to do a very quick practice, very quick warm-up, but it worked out okay because I played nicely."

Herbert started more than an hour earlier than Garcia and opened with a double-bogey before recovering to post a level-par 70. "This morning was a bit thrown out. It's already going to be tricky here with so much going on around the tournament so you've already got to factor in a little bit more time and the traffic was horrific this morning," he said. "We had to get a police escort to get here and I was still really late."

Open organisers the R&A said yesterday's congestion was due to specific incidents and not a wider problem.

"An unfortunate combination of circumstances with a breakdown and a minor collision at about the same time created some delays this morning," said a spokesman.