The DP World Tour continues its Opening Swing with a second visit to South Africa for the Alfred Dunhill Championship. Here are your five things to know.
A change in venue
A quarter of a century on from its inaugural edition, the Alfred Dunhill Championship returns to Johannesburg — the city where it was first staged from 2000 to 2004 at Houghton Golf Club. Following an intense summer in which Leopard Creek hosted both the Alfred Dunhill Championship and the prestigious Africa Amateur Championship, the course now takes a well-earned period of recovery.
Royal Johannesburg steps in as host, with its East Championship Course — originally designed in 1939 by Robert Grimsdell and revitalized in 2017 with new greens and strategic bunkering — widely regarded among Africa’s finest. Having staged the Joburg Open across a decade-long span from 2007 to 2017, this marks only the second DP World Tour event to be played at Royal Johannesburg.
Norris defends
Last year, home favourite Shaun Norris carded a final-round 67 to come back from six strokes back and win by one shot. Leopard Creek’s difficult closing stretch picked off the chasing pack one by one until only countryman Ryan van Velzen had a realistic chance of denying Norris at least a play-off. Locked alongside Norris as he stood at the 18th tee, Van Velzen hit his approach shot into the water and was unable to save par to help Norris clinch his second DP World Tour title and second in his homeland having won the Steyn City Championship in 2022. It also came hot on the heels of a return to the winner’s circle at the Golf Nippon Series JT Cup on the Japan Golf Tour. Norris came close to a second win on the 2025 Race to Dubai at the Joburg Open, losing out in a play-off, as he went on to comfortably reach the season-ending DP World Tour Championship in Dubai for the first time since his debut in 2020.
Event history
Co-sanctioned with the Sunshine Tour since its inception at the turn of the millennium, this year marks the 25th edition of the event.
First held at the start of the year, it moved to its December slot in 2004 and has retained its position since. Since England’s Anthony Wall won the inaugural edition at Houghton, there have been a further 19 different champions.
Of those, both South Africa’s Charl Schwartzel and Spain’s Pablo Martin are multiple winners. In recent years, a trend of home winners has emerged with the last four editions all having been won by home favourites. A similar run of home champions also occurred from 2011 to 2016. Among the global winners over the past two decades and more are Adam Scott and Justin Rose, who have both gone on to since become Major champions.
Inside the field
A long-standing favourite of the world’s leading professionals, former World Number Ones, Major winners, Ryder Cup and Presidents Cup stars have all competed in the Alfred Dunhill Championship.
Christiaan Bezuidenhout, a champion in 2020, is joined by fellow former winners Louis Oosthuizen, Branden Grace, Brandon Stone, Richard Sterne, Shaun Norris and Ockie Strydom. Together they make up an impressive collection of seven of the last 12 winners of the Alfred Dunhill Championship and all are looking to become only the third multiple winners in the event’s history.
Pablo Larrazábal will form part of an impressive list of European challengers seeking to end South Africa’s dominance of this title. The Spaniard was the last European to win the Alfred Dunhill Championship in 2019. John Parry finished runner-up last year, going on to finish the DP World Tour season in 11th place on the Race to Dubai Rankings, earning his PGA TOUR card for 2026. France’s Martin Couvra, the 2025 Sir Henry Cotton Rookie of the Year, and Spain’s Angel Ayora are among the young emerging talent teeing it up.
The state of play
This week is the third and penultimate week of the Opening Swing on the 2026 Race to Dubai.
So far, we have seen a double header of events in Australia while this is the second of back-to-back events in South Africa. The opening event of the Race to Dubai saw David Puig claim his maiden DP World Tour title at the BMW Australian PGA Championship, Rasmus Neergaard-Petersen became the second first-time winner in as many weeks at the Crown Australian Open.
Kristoffer Reitan, a fellow HotelPlanner Tour graduate in 2024, claimed his second DP World Tour of the year at the Nedbank Golf Challenge in honour of Gary Player. The triumph lifted the Norwegian to the summit of the Race to Dubai Rankings Delivered by DP World, on 665 points and 165 above Neergaard-Petersen and Puig.
There are 3,000 Race to Dubai points at play this week with 500 on offer to the winner in Johannesburg, with the same available at next week’s AfrAsia Bank Mauritius Open.
