We all knew how a medal-less Rory McIlroy felt about his Olympic week: “I think of how much of a sh*t show golf is right now, and you think about the two tournaments [the Olympics and the Ryder Cup] that might be the purest form of competition in our sport…” By the end of the Olympic fortnight, many others were thinking similarly.
For the first time in a few years, golf had hit the right note at the Paris Games. It was less about LIV millions and any forced, alcohol-fuelled fun than the golfers being at one with the family crowds. (It helped, of course, that the latter were able to sit on the grassy banks of Le Golf National in Guyancourt, west of the capital, and revel in what they were seeing.)
Not too many would have expected the women’s event to be in the same thrilling league as the men’s. Yet that is how things turned out when what had looked like a runaway win for New Zealand’s Lydia Ko, already the owner of silver and then bronze medals in the past two Olympics, turned into something altogether different.
She was five strokes clear with six holes to play when things took a turn for the worse as Tony Johnstone, as gifted of a TV commentator as he was a professional golfer, had an inkling of what was about to happen. “At this point,” came his uncomfortably nervy warning, “Jon Rahm was four ahead – only it didn’t work out like that …”
Not too many minutes later, Ko hit what was possibly her only rank bad shot of the week. It caught the water at the par-4 13th, and she walked from the green with a double bogey.
It was as if those who had been battling it out for the silver and bronze medals had been doused in the cold water themselves as one after another started to play catchup. Indeed, by the time Ko was teeing up at the 17th, Germany’s Esther Henseleit, who had her fiancé, Englishman and former touring pro Reece Phillips, on the bag, was only one shot to her rear.
But just when viewers everywhere would have been thinking how that Metraux shank would have affected them, so Ko demonstrated the strength of mind to do what was needed.
Ko kept things that way when she parred the 17th. However, she could have done without Switzerland's Morgane Metraux, who was in her group, hitting an almighty shank at the 18th when she herself still had to tackle her iron to the green. But just when viewers everywhere would have been thinking how that Metraux shank would have affected them, so Ko demonstrated the strength of mind to do what was needed. She unleashed a glorious shot to 7½ feet before holing the birdie that won her a gold medal in the style she deserved, simultaneously securing her place in the LPGA Hall of Fame.
It was a result to put one in mind of what Ko had said at the start of the week: “If I can leave Paris with another medal, that will be very special to me because you just never know what’s going to happen in the future,” said Ko, a 27-year-old former world No. 1 who has won 20 times on the LPGA Tour. “This may be my last opportunity, because I don’t know what’s ahead. I really want to enjoy [this one] and give myself a good run at it.”
On Sunday, the day after she won, she was confirming that the ’24 Olympics would be her last. “It couldn’t have been more of a fairytale ending to my Olympic career by bringing home a gold medal for my country. Competing in the Olympics and representing my country has been the biggest honor in my life, and there are no words to express the emotions I felt while listening to my national anthem on the podium. Thank you, New Zealand, for this once-in-a-lifetime experience. I am truly grateful.”
Who knows what is going to happen next, but suffice to say that she married her childhood sweetheart, Jun Chung, in December of ’22 after posing the question, “Will you marry me?” on a selection of golf balls, with the last one leaving room for him to circle a “yes” or a “no.”
At this point, it is worth revisiting 2012, the year when, as a 15-year-old amateur, she won the first of back-to-back Canadian Opens on the LPGA. Her parents already were wondering how it would work out if their younger daughter were to follow her golfing dream as soon as she left school.
During the ’12 Women’s British Open at Royal Liverpool, Laura Davies hazarded a guess that Ko would not be playing beyond age 30. “By the time Lydia’s 30,” Davies said, “she will have had 23 years of beating balls on a daily basis. If she doesn’t have injury problems by then – something which is pretty unlikely – she will simply have had enough.”
And if any further evidence were needed that the player should make the most of her golf at a time when she was so obviously a case apart, it came, if inadvertently, from Ko’s mother, Tina, who was caddying for her daughter at Royal Liverpool. It had struck one from the start of that event that she was markedly the least stressed of any of the golfing parents. Yes, she followed her daughter’s every shot, but — and here is the key — she had no trouble in carrying on a conversation at the same time.
Eight or so years earlier, Tina wanted a change from the South Korean way of life. The family thought of heading for Australia before wondering whether Canada might be the better fit. Only then, when they were still in two minds, they visited New Zealand where they fell in love with the landscape and the climate.
Henseleit made for a delightful surprise package when she finished in second place, though there had been a suggestion of what was to come when, as an amateur, she arrived at a plus-7.1 handicap, the first thing of its kind in Europe.
As for Xiyu “Janet” Lin, who finished third, there was nothing surprising there. When the Chinese first got the news on October 9, 2009, that golf would return to the 2016 Rio Olympics after a 112-year absence from the games, they had set in motion a development programme. The offspring of former Chinese Olympians, along with a selection of gifted youngsters, who, say, had been a couple of somersaults short of making the national team in gymnastics, would be turned into golfers.
As Tenniel Chu, the executive director of China’s Mission Hills, that sprawling 12-course club in Shenzhen, explained at the time, “What we are doing is to give these kids a second chance. They can catch up on their education and, hopefully, they can train into top golfers. We have a model we are trying to show to the world.”
Lin, whose mother had been an international footballer, was among those early starters. She won two tournaments on the China LPGA tour in 2012 and, upon turning 16, became the youngest ever to collect a Ladies European Tour card.
It all helped lead to golf’s Olympic moment in Paris.
E-MAIL LEWINE
Top: Lydia Ko caps a golden fortnight for Olympic golf.
TRACY WILCOX, PGA Tour VIA IGF