A decade on, Rio's Olympic course is still the city's only public 18

Ten years on from the closing ceremony of the Rio Games, most of what Brazil built for that fortnight has struggled to justify itself. The golf course is the exception, in the narrow sense that it is still there. Gil Hanse's layout on the western edge of Rio de Janeiro survives as the city's only public 18-hole golf course, serving a metropolitan area of 13.9 million people, about a million more than greater Los Angeles.

It also needs money.

What was actually built in Rio?

A course costing roughly $19 million, commissioned specifically for golf's return to the Olympics after a 112-year absence. Adilson da Silva, a Brazilian, hit the first ceremonial tee shot in 2016, and the hope attached to that shot was that a country would follow him onto the fairways.

The additions since have been modest and telling: a bar, a children's play area, and one of the few conventional golf shops in a country where equipment retail often runs through vending machines.

What happened at the 2016 Olympics?

Two of the more memorable weeks of golf that decade. Justin Rose made the first hole-in-one in Olympic golf during the opening round, then spent Sunday in a two-man fight with Henrik Stenson that reached the par-5 18th all square. Rose chipped from around 25 yards to tap-in range; Stenson three-putted for bogey. Rose became the first male Olympic golf champion since 1904.

Inbee Park's week was less dramatic and more improbable. A thumb injury had kept her off the LPGA Tour since a missed cut at the KPMG Women's PGA Championship in June, she withdrew from the UL International Crown, missed the cut in her only tune-up, and considered giving up her Olympic place entirely. She then opened 66-66, added a 70 and closed with another 66 to win by five.

Kuchar's bronze came with a 63 that tied the course record. Park became the first woman to win Olympic golf gold since Margaret Abbott in 1900.

Did the Olympics grow golf in Brazil?

No, and the people who said so at the time have been proved right. Writing in 2016, Golfweek's then architecture editor Brad Klein argued that a fortnight of televised elite competition has never, anywhere in the developing world, produced mass participation, and that without a deliberate populist push to get ordinary young people playing, golf would stay a game of the wealthy. A decade later that is a fair description of Brazilian golf.

The scale of the gap is easy to state. The R&A's global participation report puts Central and South America behind even Africa for the number of nine- and 18-hole golfers, on a continent of roughly 440 million people. The upside argument runs the same direction: a small percentage change against that population is a very large number of new golfers, which is why manufacturers, developers and broadcasters keep watching.

Who is keeping it going?

Advocates rather than institutions. Humberto Martins, one of Brazil's best-known actors, has spent years pushing golf into the culture, including persuading telenovela writers to make the game part of his characters' lives, and is a regular at the Olympic course.

At the other end is Paco Casini, who turned 19 recently, caddies at the course and practises between loops. He finished third at the Aberto do Campo Olimpico de Golfe, which earned him a world amateur ranking, though with few chances to play internationally he sits 1,242nd. He is direct about why the talent pool is thin: playing costs money, so players with money join private clubs and everyone else does not play.

It's the only public course in Rio.

What it means for golfers

The course is playable and, by the standards of a former Olympic venue, reasonably priced, which is more than can be said for most of what Rio built in 2016. That is the part worth protecting. Management is due to transfer to the Brazilian Golf Federation, and the single question that decides this course's next decade is not whether it stays open but what it costs an ordinary Brazilian to walk on. Public access that only the wealthy can afford is a private club with better branding.