Laid-back Jose Maria Olazabal yesterday took full advantage of an extended rain delay at the Golf Club de Lyon by catching 40 winks before going out to shoot 66, two behind the English pacemaker Daren Lee, in the weather-hit first round of the French Open.
Scheduled for a breakfast-time start, the Spaniard was obliged to click his heels for two hours and then two hours more but instead of watching the clouds simply found a quiet corner to nap while the greens staff attended the fairways.
"You can't practise for four hours and it's tough to know what to do with yourself, but I managed to sleep for 45 minutes," Olazabal explained.
"They were trying very hard to play the course as near as possible to normal. In the end they had to reduce one par five to a par three - it happened once before in an Italian Open and it was no problem."
With par reduced from 72 to 70 Olazabal finished on four under but was making no predictions, saying: "I'll sit and wait and see what happens. There's a lot of danger out there from water and bushes and many bad things can happen."
Olazabal made four birdies and narrowly missed a fifth at the last after the cup was resited when his French playing partner Raphael Jacquelin's pitch took a lump out of the rim of the original hole.
The Essex-based Londoner Lee made his move with two early birdies: having holed from 18 feet at the short fourth, he followed up with another from 12 feet at a 571-yard fifth that had been reduced to a 177-yard par three. He put his six-birdie effort down to adding three degrees of loft to his putter and not playing a practice round.
The 36-year-old, who avoided an eighth visit to the tour's qualifying school last year with a fifth place in the BMW event in Munich, explained: "A practice round can take five hours and you end up watching everybody else instead of doing what you want to do. I simply hit a lot of chips and putts and work out the lines.
"I was poor on the greens in missing the cut in Portugal last week and decided to give my putter a whack to increase the loft to five degrees, which gave me a lot more confidence."
With the weather closing in to prevent half the field finishing, Lee - leading amateur in Nick Faldo's 1992 Open at Muirfield - led by one from Sweden's Anders Forsbrand and the Englishmen Warren Bennett and Jonathan Lomas, all on 65.
Paddy Gribben, on 68, was the best of the three Irish players to complete their rounds. David Higgins trailed him by one stroke while David Mooney went round in 72. Paul McGinley was one under par after nine holes, while Philip Walton and Gary Murphy were level after 12 and 15 holes respectively.
