Sweden's growing influence within the European Tour has gained rich emphasis over the last two weeks. After capturing the BMW International in Munich, Robert Karlsson went on to claim a share of second place behind Costantino Rocca at Crans-surSierre last weekend.
As it happened, another Swede, Patrik Sjoland, was tied fourth in Switzerland. And in between, there was compelling evidence of that country's strength in depth when Jesper Parnevik, as a wild card choice last Thursday, became their second representative on this month's Ryder Cup team.
Yet we shouldn't be surprised. When the Scandinavian Masters was staged in Malmo four weeks ago, no fewer than 15 Swedes made the cut, compared with nine Irish in the Murphy's Irish Open a month previously. And one of them, Joakim Haeggman, went on to capture the Scandinavian Masters title.
The achievements of Karlsson, Haeggman, Per-Ulrik Johansson (English Open and Smurfit European Open) and Michael Jonzon (Portuguese Open) this season, represent an extremely rich harvest, which is being reaped from the endeavours of the Swedish Golf Federation in recent decades.
They decided to radically overhaul the country's approach to the game at the lowest level, starting with an insistence that everyone who played golf had to be a member of a golf club. This remains mandatory and applies to men and women, juniors and seniors, amateurs and professionals.
In addition, every club was obliged to allocate a certain proportion of its membership, normally 20 per cent, to juniors. And the response has been remarkable, not least for the fact that the annual subscription remains an extremely modest £70.
Peter Svallin, a former European Tour player, is now coach to the Swedish national teams. "If I compare my national team now to 10 years ago, I don't think there would be one or two players from then who would be as good as the players today," he said.
Svallin went on: "On average, we had one or two good players per year over the last 10 years. Now, I have up to six very good players and I know from my national team that there will be five or six on the European Tour in the next three to four years."
By their own admission, the Swedes had few players of international quality as recently as 20 years ago. Through lucrative sponsorship, however, serious money was poured into the game. At the moment, the SGF spend in excess of £1.4 million each year on training and development, bringing players together for squad training several times in the course of a season. In this and other areas, such as amateurs competing for cash in professional events, it is suspected that the Swedes have severely stretched the Royal and Ancient's rules of amateur status. But they blithely ignore such details in their relentless pursuit of excellence.
"I think the junior programmes are a big reason for our progress," said US-based tournament professional Helen Alfredsson.
This is reflected in the Foreningsbanken Cup, a series of tournaments in which upwards of 8,000 juniors compete annually - compared with 3,000 for the US Junior Amateur in a country with a golfing population of 24 million. Beyond that is the Teen Tour, followed by the recently-instituted Junior Tour for players aged 19 to 21. One event, the Trygg-Hansa Classic, has drawn 18,000 entries three years running.
When Sweden set their minds to achieving in golf what they had done in tennis, sceptics seriously doubted their chances of success. Now, it is a matter of just how powerful they can become.
