Even as a teenager smashing records, Lydia Ko refused to be called a sporting prodigy. At 15, she became the youngest female golfer ever to win a major. At 17, she was crowned number one in the Women’s World Golf Rankings. And the following year, she hit her first hole in one at the 2016 Rio Olympics. But winning streaks are hard to maintain, and Lydia has had to face the ups and downs of elite sportswomanship head-on. Now 26, having hit the top spot once again, she’s making plans for retirement. But first she’s heading to Paris 2024, with hopes of striking gold.
Lydia Ko was 14 when she won the NSW Open in Sydney by four strokes, becoming the youngest winner ever, male or female, of a professional golf tour event. A year later, she won two more – unprecedented for an amateur. By the time Lydia was 17, she was the youngest ever number one in the Women’s World Golf Rankings (Tiger Woods was 21 before he made number one). When she triumphed in the Evian Championship in France that year, she became the youngest female golfer to win a major. Her fourth-round score of 63 was the lowest ever final-round score. (She broke that record in 2021 with a final-round score of 62 at the ANA Inspiration.)
Lydia won so much and so fast that the LPGA waived its usual stipulation that athletes have to be 18 to turn pro – she did so at the age of 16 years and 172 days, on 13 October 2013, having spent 130 weeks as the top-ranked woman amateur golfer. She has competed in two Olympic Games (Rio and Tokyo) and won medals in both (silver and bronze). She has claimed almost 100 top-10 finishes. And with more than $16 million in prize money so far, she is one of the highest-earning female golfers of all time. It is sometimes hard to remember that Lydia is only 26.
“I still don’t feel like I’m the best,” Lydia says as she drives me around Lake Merced Golf Club in Daly City, just south of San Francisco. The course used to be a tour stop, and in 2018 Lydia made headlines when, in the playoff against the Australian Minjee Lee, she made a 234-yard shot to within two feet of the hole for an eagle on the 18th to win the championship. It was so spectacular that the club has commemorated it with a plaque. At the ceremony when it was laid, Lydia joked, “This is where I’ll be buried.”
So it was a thrill to be in her golf cart, careening around Lake Merced. As she steers, I sneak a peek at what I know to be her first tattoo, on her wrist, commemorating the date of her triumph in the inaugural Swinging Skirts LPGA Classic in 2014. She had come out one stroke ahead, with a birdie on the par-five 18th, to notch up the opening tour win of her pro career. That, too, happened here at Lake Merced. (Her father was the last to notice the notation. For months, she wore bracelets to cover it.)
Years ago, she told a reporter that a course like Lake Merced had to be solved “like a game”. Now, when she looks out over its doglegs and canted greens she narrows her gaze: this is a woman who has cracked that puzzle. No longer the demure, bespectacled girl in a polo shirt and charcoal shorts, she’s a powerhouse of her sport. The fourth hole is the trickiest, she tells me. The 12th stretches over a gaping vale. (Since she was a child, she has kept a mental catalogue of terrains and greens around the world, the ones she likes – fescue grass and bentgrass at Windross Farm in New Zealand – and the ones that have unsettled her – Bermuda grass in Florida.
