By: Max Bechtoldt
The greatest Olympic golfer ever. Maybe there could be a debate before, with Lydia Ko of New Zealand missing the gold medal, now, there’s no competition. There won’t be for a very long time either.
Lydia Ko won her third career Olympic medal Saturday in Paris. No other golfer, man or woman has ever won two. She won Silver in Rio, Bronze in Tokyo, and now, finally, Gold in Paris.
It was a complicated day for Ko. She entered in a share for the lead with Switzerland’s Morgane Metraux at -9. While seemingly every player in contention was falling apart around her, Ko stayed strong and steady. Her -2 score on the front nine was enough to give her a four-stroke lead at the turn, and that lead soon reached five.
Then came hole 13. It wasn’t a question of “if” Ko would have a bad hole, more “when?” and “how severe?” The short par 4 is the first in a stretch of difficult water approach shots. Her second found it. After hitting an average wedge in on her next shot, she suffered a double bogey.
The key to this event was not compounding errors, as Jon Rahm did last week, and many players did throughout this week and specifically the final round. Ko didn’t allow it to get worse. She had pars on every hole until 18, which was exactly what she needed, securing the two-stroke victory at -10.
Finishing with the silver medal was Germany’s Esther Henseleit, who had a brilliant -6 final round to finish -8 for the tournament. For the bronze medal, Xiyu Lin finished at -7, neither Henseleit nor Lin have any LPGA Tour wins, though they are known as good and experienced players. More about those two medalists in our continuing Olympic Coverage.
With this, Ko achieves the now once-in-a-decade achievement of reaching the LPGA Tour Hall of Fame. No player since Inbee Park in 2016 has earned this achievement. The hardest hall of fame to reach in professional sports now has a new member. The legendary, transcendent superstar, Lydia Ko.
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