ÉVIAN-LES-BAINS, FRANCE | The Olympic Games are on the horizon at this week’s fourth women’s major championship of 2024, both literally and metaphorically.
On the one hand, the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland, is on the other side of Lake Geneva from the spa town of Évian-les-Bains, which hosts the Evian Championship – so the Games are, in that sense, quite literally on the horizon.
The museum, which Amy Yang, last month’s KPMG Women’s PGA Championship winner, visited early this week, tells the story of the modern Olympiad, but the golfers who are playing this week, and then again in Paris next month (the metaphorical horizon), are less interested in reading about the past than writing the future.
And that means winning a trophy this week in the south of France and a medal next month in the City of Light.
One episode not reported in the Lausanne museum concerns the remarkable tale of the first female golfer to win an Olympic gold medal, at the 1900 Paris Games.
Margaret Abbott was a cosmopolitan character and unlikely sporting champion. She was born in Kolkata, then part of the British Raj, the daughter of a rich American merchant father and literary editor mother. Brought up in Boston, Massachusetts and Chicago, Illinois, Abbott found herself by 1900 to be studying art with her mother in Paris.
The second edition of the modern Olympics coincided with the Paris Exposition, and there was a certain amount of confusion surrounding both affairs. Mother and daughter were keen golfers and, responding to a newspaper notice of a nine-hole event, signed up.
Abbott won the event with a score of 47 and was presented with an old Saxon porcelain bowl mounted in gold. Even when she died in 1955 at age 76, she was blissfully unaware that she had, in fact, won an Olympic competition. Her family only discovered the fact in the mid-1980s.
The contrast between that bizarre experience and American Nelly Korda’s could hardly be more profound.
“I had a couple of tears, and I know that my Whoop [fitness tracker] said the highest heart rate I had that day was on the podium.” — Nelly Korda
Korda won gold three years ago at the COVID-delayed Tokyo Games and has witnessed the magical effect of her medal ever since.
“Whenever I bring it out around my friends and family, they’re always amazed and really moved by it,” she said. “Just seeing that impact, of people by it, has been really cool.
“It has its own shelf in my office. My [two] majors are on one shelf and then the Olympics on another. I have a plaque that Nasa Hataoka’s caddie, Greg [Johnston], made with the Olympic rings.”
Abbott never knew the exhilaration that comes with being winner of a worldwide event, but Korda remains in thrall to the unique nature of Olympic triumph.
“When I stood on that podium there was a complete rush of emotion that I’ve never felt in my entire life,” she said. “Seeing my country’s flag go up – that’s when I realized that, Wow, I just won an Olympic gold medal and everyone I watched on TV get to stand on the podium, that’s what I’m doing right now.
“I had a couple of tears, and I know that my Whoop [fitness tracker] said the highest heart rate I had that day was on the podium.”
And what is she most looking forward to on her return?
“It’s the little things you don’t get to do every week,” she said. “The camaraderie between the countries, and it’s really cool how everyone trades pins. I still have that badge with all my pins right next to my medal.”
Korda is far from alone in being excited about the return to France next month.
France’s Céline Boutier, the defending champion here this week, said ahead of the Tokyo Games when some players were undecided on whether to play or not that she would go by boat if necessary. Winning a first major championship on home soil last summer only furthered the Parisian’s excitement about the 2024 Games.
“To put on the red, white, and blue at the Olympics, that’s going to be a pretty surreal experience.” — Rose Zhang
“I could not have scripted it better,” she said this week. “I grew up watching the Olympics and never imagined I’d be playing golf at the Olympics in my home country, let alone at Le Golf National. I was inspired watching [U.S. swimmer] Michael Phelps and [Jamaican sprinter] Usain Bolt dominate in their fields, and it would be an absolute dream come true to step on the podium in Paris.”
Rose Zhang will represent Team USA in Paris alongside Korda and Lilia Vu, and Zhang’s summer already has a multisport aspect to it. She stopped off in London for a day at Wimbledon on her way to France, and throughout the last month her English caddie, Olly Brett, has been keeping her up-to-date with his nation’s progress in soccer’s European Championship. She described the tennis in London as inspirational and expects more of the same in Paris.
“To put on the red, white, and blue at the Olympics, that’s going to be a pretty surreal experience,” Zhang said.
Not everyone’s Olympic flame was burning brightly this week, however.
Momoka Kobori isn’t playing at Évian, but the talk among Ladies European Tour players and officials at the start of the week was all about the decision of the New Zealand Olympic Committee to reject her appeal against her non-selection for Paris.
Kobori initially was overwhelmed by messages of congratulations from family, friends and golf fans when she apparently fulfilled the criteria for making the Olympic field by finishing inside the qualifying rankings’ top 60 at the June 24 cutoff point.
Three days later, she was informed that the NZOC thought differently, and it argued there was no evidence of her having competed creditably against the world’s elite. Her request for second thoughts fell on deaf ears.
She had talked of competing in the Olympics as a “childhood dream” earlier this season, and now it has become something of a nightmare.
“I’m certainly disappointed that I have missed the opportunity to represent my country at the Olympics,” she wrote on Instagram. “But I’m grateful to the NZOC for giving me the opportunity to put my case forward. Although the outcome was not what I had hoped for, I have no regrets and I look forward to the next opportunity to put my case forward.”
With Kobori’s Olympic torch extinguished, the words attributed to the founder of the modern games, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, must be ringing more than a little bit hollow in the ears: “The important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part. Just as in life, what counts is not the victory but the struggle.”