Day one of the historic 2025 PDGA World Championships is in the books in Finland and what a day it was for the first PDGA World Championship to be held in Europe.

Get caught up on all of the action below.

• Henna Blomroos Leads The Pro Worlds After Opening Round
• Hot Start For Sullivan Tipton At The Pro Worlds
• Coverage from JomezPro
• Coverage from MDG Media

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Just the Start in Finland

By Bogi Bjarnason
PDGA Europe Board of Directors

On the first feature card at the 2025 PDGA Professional Disc Golf World Championships, Silva Saarinen picks up where she left off in Tallinn by burying an edge of circle downhill death putt from behind a tree for the only birdie on the card. Evellina Salonen, tasked with defending her World title on home soil, finds the fairway very short and then lofts a touchy midrange forehand anhyzer under the bucket for a par. Cadence Burge, meanwhile, sails her drive deep and airballs a Circle 2 uphill putt to the edge the circle.

Unfazed she steps up and buries the comeback with authority. As Eve blows up with an OB bonanza on hole 3, it feels like the writing is on the wall from the drop. If the winds stay down, the spoils will go to whoever paints within the lines and cashes putts from outside of them. Saarinen and Burge trade blows early and seem like the front-running candidates for the title, but Burge can’t keep up the pace set by Saarinen and drops down into 14th place courtesy of a +1 round.

As quietly as you can from the feature card of the largest disc golf event in history, Rachel Turton creeps up from behind. Turton seems to have found the missing link in her otherwise full arsenal, her putting. As she rings up every single one of her 13 C1X looks for a 100% rate, while finding out of bounds only twice, she converts an impressive set of stats into a -4 round that propels her into a second place tie with Silva Saarinen, Kat Mertsch and the indomitable Finnish wunderkind IIda Lehtomaki who turns a triple bogey on hole 4 into a -4 score.

But the real story of the round happens far away from prying eyes on an earlier card where Henna Blomroos, oblivious to all putting woes, turns her air superiority into the -6 hot round despite finding OB twice and missing from inside the circle four times.

It's a slow news day from the second feature card in general as Holyn Handley proceeds to paint outside the lines at a prodigious rate to the tune of +3, while Missy Gannon sandwiches four birdies with an absolutely brutal 14 on the infamous hole 16 and turns in a total score of ten over par. Kristin Lätt exited the course with the same score that she entered, even par, with a slow start.

Nothing is etched in stone yet as we have five rounds to contest out here on the fairways of Finland. Can air superiority suppress the rapid cover fire from the putting green? Will stronger winds shut down the flippy plastic and will The Monster conquer the smaller arms? Tune in tomorrow to find out!

MPO

With Worlds coming to Finland and the field being not only the strongest but also the most diverse its ever been, reporting on round one is a daunting task. Not only did no player from the two featured cards make it to round two lead card, but I did not witness a single shot being thrown by any player who did.

Could we expect that the premier forehand dominant player on tour in Sullivan Tipton might light up The Beast like the sky on the fourth of July? Yes, we have all seen what Chandler Kramer accomplished there.

Likewise we could all imagine that Adam Hammes would reignite that old Minoqua magic on a venue that caters to it. But Pyry Joutsen was on nobody’s bingo card. His picture isn’t even on his PDGA Live bio. But somehow he rode a clean score card to a 1074 rated -11 round that puts him tied with Hammes for second place going into round two. Well done, mate!

Eetu Tuominen, on the other hand is a 1026 rated teenager who we have seen climb the leaderboard before. Hopefully this time he can stay a while.

From the featured cards, however, the going was tough. Gannon Buhr, of course, did many Buhr things, and one very non Buhr thing. After the airhorn to the second lightning delay of the round found his card halfway down the fairway of hole 18 he seems to have come back a bit frustrated. And rightfully so. At least we have to assume so because the shanked upshot that nearly took down the scoreboard behind the green of 18 might be the worst shot ever thrown up that hill. In any case, it found the scoreboard with such force that it skipped backwards several meters back into Circle 2. From there he had a lengthy birdie look for lead card that did not find chains.

The reigning World Champion Isaac Robinson struggled out of the gate. Sure he found some fairways and only a pair of OBs, but his search for the greens was fairly futile, and when he found them he struggled to convert. This left him with a lackluster -3 outing and an uphill battle in front of him going into the latter rounds.

Vainö Makela went into Worlds en fuego. From the main feature card he torched the first eight holes for a feast of birdies and came out of the front nine at -8, a feat matched only by Garret Gurthie off of the first card. Unfortunately a similar fate would befall him as did Double G only hours earlier. After falling flat for a stretch of pars during the mid section of the course, he emerged back from the first weather delay of the day full of spit and vinegar and turned that pent up fury into two birdies on holes 14 and the toughest scoring hole to par in hole 15. All this before blowing up his day by missing the island on hole 16 repeatedly forcing him to write the number nine on his scorecard.

Meanwhile Calvin Heimburg briefly recovered from a couple of early mistakes with a four birdie streak on the mid section of the course, but neither one of the weather delays did him any favors and he went tepid through the final stretch to turn in an unremarkable -6 on the day.

Niklas Antilla is the face of this competition and on this, the biggest of all stages, he did exactly what can be expected of him by turning in a -7 round that matched his 1044 player rating down to the decimal point. I suspect a slow but steady climb out him in the coming rounds.

And finally we turn our attention towards Paul McBeth. Despite remaining perfect from Circle 1 and cashing in on a third of his opportunities from beyond the arch, Paul found the OB no less than five times, resulting in a three under par effort on the day. Exactly the kind of stuff he does to set the stage for an 1100 rated smoke show on round two.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

Come back tomorrow when we can do some more focused reporting on the players that earned their space in the spotlight off of the sweat of their own backs.

Bogi Bjarnason serves on the PDGA Europe Board of Directors.