The Asian Tour may extend its 2020 season into the early part of 2021 due to tournament postponements caused by the Covid-19 outbreak.
The tour’s commissioner and CEO, Cho Minn Thant, revealed that they were considering an extended 2020/2021 schedule to make up for the affected events.
“It’s a bit of a downer that our tournaments are being affected by Covid-19, but we just have to take it in our stride and see what happens. Perhaps extend the season or hopefully some tournaments which are affected will come back later for a very, very heavy second half of the schedule,” said Cho.
Given the unpredictability of the current situation, Cho noted that they were unable to say for sure the extent to which the season will be extended, if that comes to pass.
“It’s unpredictable right now, there are things changing every day, so we’re playing it by ear. To be fair to our members who have exemptions this year, who have just come through qualifying school and have some status from last year, if the season is dramatically affected by Covid-19, we’ll look at measures to extend the season till next year.
“Obviously we can’t say when we can stage tournaments safely, so we can’t really identify a definite end to the season right now … but personally I think it’s going to go beyond December 2020 for sure,” he said.
Cho noted that the start of this season was looking really good until events like the Maybank Championship in Malaysia (co-sanctioned with the European Tour), the Royal’s Cup in Thailand and the Bangabandhu Cup Open in Bangladesh were postponed due to concerns and travel restrictions related to the Covid-19 outbreak.
“We were looking at having five in a row before all this Covid-19 stuff happened. It was supposed to be New Zealand, Malaysia, Thailand, India, Bangladesh – and having played the Hong Kong Open and Singapore Open in January, it was probably the biggest start to an Asian Tour season on paper for a long, long time, even for over a decade,” he said.
