Retiring Nordqvist marches to her own beat
By Lewine Mair • August 28, 2026
It was an odd business. On the 26th of July, the last day of the Women’s Scottish Open at Dundonald Links, Anna Nordqvist, who is Europe’s captain for the upcoming Solheim Cup at Bernardus Golf in the Netherlands, talked of how she had ruled herself out of juggling the captaincy with playing against the Americans. “I took on the captaincy because I was content that I was going to play in another [Solheim Cup],” she said.
Now 39, she could certainly have played in another – and another. Yet on Wednesday, the three-time major winner announced she would retire from competitive golf after playing in this week’s FM Championship near Boston.
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“I’m not sure what the future has in store for me, but it’s with a grateful heart I have decided to retire from playing professional golf to focus on my health and my family,” she wrote in a letter that she read on Instagram.
Of course she was entitled to change her mind, but it did set her fans wondering why she would have sent out the news ahead of the Solheim Cup rather than after it, especially when she has never been one for courting attention from the media. (In teenage years, she had thought she would like to be a journalist, only one week in a newspaper office told her that there was nothing she would like to do less.)
Vis-à-vis the Solheim Cup, Nordqvist has always wanted to do things her way and, at least as yet, her way has been very different to that of the U.S. captain, Angela Stanford. Whereas Stanford had given up on competitive golf in November 2024 to devote herself to her captaincy role, Nordqvist found herself playing some of the best golf of her career. Though it helped her to stay in touch with plenty of her “team possibles,” it can only have been a tortuous experience, especially when she closed with a 68 to finish among the leading Europeans at the recent AIG Women’s Open at Royal Lytham & St Annes.
