Nelly Korda says premature Olympic shank hints at bigger downside

With 18 holes remaining on the 2024 Paris Olympics, girls’s World No. 1 Nelly Korda trailed by 5 photographs at Le Golf Nationwide, and hoped to channel a few of her compatriot Scottie Scheffler’s magic from final week’s Olympic males’s competitors, when Scheffler charged from six photographs again to assert the gold medal.

“I’m giving myself an opportunity,” Korda mentioned on Friday. “Something can occur. Scottie was 9 again, or no matter he was at, and he ended up successful.”

Sadly for Korda, the cost she wanted by no means materialized. Whereas she bought off to an auspicious begin with two birdies in her opening three holes, bogeys at Nos. 5 and seven introduced her again to even on the day. She made the flip at one-under for the spherical after a birdie on the ninth, however her possibilities of following up her Tokyo gold with one other medal in Paris have been sunk on brutal bogey-birdie-double-par-bogey stretch on Nos. 13-17. Korda in the end shot a final-round 75 to complete T22, 4 photographs behind American teammate Rose Zhang (T8), and 9 photographs behind winner Lydia Ko.

It was the double on No. 15, although, that was notably devastating to Korda’s medal hopes, and she or he addressed the problem after her spherical.

“I simply shanked it,” she mentioned. “I simply hit it fats and hit it brief and into the water.”

In accordance with Korda, the shank wasn’t the one downside she handled throughout her last spherical.

“I believe not too long ago what’s been occurring to me is I make a mistake after which I make one other mistake on prime of it,” she mentioned. “Needing to manage that little bit of it the place I don’t compile all of the errors, which that’s what I’ve been form of doing not too long ago.”

Regardless of the disappointing end, Korda was pleased with her efforts.

“I’m by no means going to cease attempting and I’m all the time going to strive my hardest and I’m by no means going to again down,” she mentioned. “On the finish of the day, I performed some actually strong golf for 3 years from Tokyo to get me again on to this group and to characterize the USA, and to be on the Olympics once more. I’m a two-time Olympian and I’ve a gold medal and I’m pleased with that.”

Whereas the boys’s season is wrapping up with the beginning of the FedExCup playoffs subsequent week, the ladies nonetheless have the yr’s last main left on the calendar. Subsequent week, the LPGA tour heads to Dundonald Hyperlinks for the Scottish Open, adopted by the Girls’s Open on the Outdated Course at St. Andrews, the place Korda will chase her fifteenth profession LPGA victory and third main championship.

Golf.com Editor

As a four-year member of Columbia’s inaugural class of feminine varsity golfers, Jessica can out-birdie everybody on the masthead. She will be able to out-hustle them within the workplace, too, the place she’s primarily liable for producing each print and on-line options, and overseeing main particular initiatives, resembling GOLF’s inaugural Model Is­sue, which debuted in February 2018. Her origi­nal interview collection, “A Spherical With,” debuted in November of 2015, and appeared in each within the journal and in video kind on GOLF.com.