Inside Lydia Ko’s tearful journey to Olympic glory and the Hall of Fame

SAINT-QUENTIN-EN-YVELINES, France — Lydia Ko was crying in hotel rooms. Frequently, too. Whenever she’d get home from a disappointing round, tears were bound to follow. When she’d kick off a tournament with a 65 and follow it with a 72. When she was ranked 10th in the world and playing like 110th, thinking to herself, What’s going to be at the end of this tunnel?

But this wasn’t 15-year-old Ko, a green LPGA rookie. It wasn’t 22-year-old Ko, battling her first wave of career struggles. It was 26-year-old Ko, just last year, at the Staybridge Suites in northwest Arkansas, chasing after the LPGA Hall of Fame. 

The LPGA’s Hall is a different beast. You don’t get voted in by accumulating first-team awards or by thumping your chest in a team event. You earn it with victories. Solo victories. Each win is worth a point — majors are worth double — and year-long, singular awards add to your total. Twenty-seven points gets you in, 26 doesn’t. (Laura Davies is in the World Golf Hall of Fame, but not the LPGA’s.) All of which puts very accomplished female golfers in a tricky position: the closer you get, the more everyone knows about it and asks about it, the more tantalizing that checkpoint becomes. It played with Ko’s mind. 

Ko earned her 25th Hall of Fame point after a thrilling 2022 season — when three wins elevated her to No. 1 in the world for the first time in years. Then came 2023 and the worst season of her career. Between March and September, she missed four cuts and had no top 30s. She’d go to events and see pictures of her former self holding trophies and it would feel like a distant memory. The HOF circled in her head. Other LPGA legends would talk to and commiserate with her about it.

Seemingly out of nowhere, Ko won the first LPGA event of 2024, earning HOF point No. 26. All she needed was one more precious point, and it nearly happened a week later. Needing a birdie to win on the final hole, her approach shot missed the green and came to a stop, oddly, against a bouquet of 27 white roses the LPGA had brought out greenside — along with a bottle of champagne — one for each Hall of Fame point. From there, Ko took paradoxical relief, made par, but lost in a playoff to Nelly Korda, who would win every tournament she’d enter for the next three months. 

Ko was gutted, to use her words, but quickly realized its the words of others that drive the point home. Ko was asked about being on the doorstep of the HOF at basically every tournament she entered. You could feel some pain in her answers early in the year — Florida was a lost opportunity. And for someone who has always talked about retiring at age 30, a deadline appeared in the distance. So much that Ko began struggling again. Her mother, Hyeon Bong-sook, and husband, Jun Chung, stepped in.

“I think they made me realize that, hey, even if it doesn’t happen, that’s just my fate,” Ko said. “I’m going to do my absolute best to keep putting myself in contention and in good position going into the final days, but whether it happens or not, I think there’s a golf God somewhere that controls it.”

That’s when she started scripting.

“If I do win gold at Paris,” Ko said just 17 days ago at the Canadian Open, ”I feel like somebody needs to get me a Cinderella slipper because it’s just a story that even I couldn’t have drawn up.”

It’s a fairytale not only for the Hall of Fame but also for Ko’s Olympics journey. Before this week, she was already the most decorated player in golf’s young Olympic lifespan. She won silver in Rio and then took bronze in Tokyo. She’s gotten emotional each time on the medal stand, representing New Zealand. She gave that silver medal to her father, which he keeps in a closet of trinkets — everything from whiskey bottles to memorabilia to Olympic hardware. The bronze is with her sister, in Korea, where it was on display at their grandmother’s funeral. 

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When Ko arrived at Le Golf National, she promised that were she to add the only medal she’s missing, she would demand the others back. She’d clear out her trophy room — maybe even make a new trophy room for the Medal Slam (a feat that may not take place for what, another 100 years?). It was a fun thought. A fun visual. A fun acknowledgement that in the age of One Shot at a Time, there’s still room to plan out your dreams, no matter their likelihood. 

“You say those kind of things and until it really happens, it’s not really factual,” Ko said. “You know, it’s something that you keep going towards, too.”

She began her third Olympics with an even-par 72 Wednesday before quietly carving out a 67 Thursday, just trying to keep pace with Morgane Metraux’s sizzling, eight-under start. When I asked Ko about the Hall of Fame at the halfway point, she punched back with a bit of sarcasm. In short, this course is too hard to think about anything else, but, “It’s really cool that if I did win the gold, I could get in the Hall of Fame, and it would stop all these questions, like from you, in the future.”

She smiled because she knew the query was coming. The closer you get, the more we’re going to talk about it. But when Ko shot 68 Friday to tie for the 54-hole lead, there were no Hall of Fame q’s. We were transfixed by her admission that she deleted Instagram off her phone for the week — during the most Instagrammable sporting event on earth — and had drawn inspiration from a Simone Biles documentary. She even wrote a Biles quote in her yardage book as a reminder:

“I get to write my own ending.”

Conveniently on Saturday, half the contenders began to write the ending for her. At a course setup that rivaled major championships, on which everyone in the field stressed patience all week, aggressive pursuits of the podium began backfiring. Hannah Green and Rouning Yin were staring down bronze when they both hooked tee shots into water. Miyu Yamashita tied Ko early but then played Wedge Ping-Pong from opposite sides of the 9th green. Nelly Korda, trying to follow Scottie Scheffler with her own best-player-in-the-world comeback, made two birdies in her first three holes, but got loose off the tee and left her medal hopes in the water, too. Le Golf National was reaching out and grabbing players. Nary a single scorecard was spared.

Ko walked off the 11th tee at 11 under and saw the carnage had built her a five-shot lead. But when she doubled 13, her advantage was just three. And by the time she reached the 15th fairway, it was just one. Esther Henseleit was relaxing in the clubhouse, feet up in front of a television, at eight under par. 

Ko’s ending was written not with a pen but with patience. She labored through nervy three-footers on 15 and 16, all while being timed by rules officials. A few times, her playing partners waited out her putts from the next tee box.

“We practice a lot of [three-footers] when we are training,” Ko said. It was the last thing she did before teeing off Saturday. “But you don’t realize how important those are until you’re in those kind of circumstances and you have multiple in a row.”

At 17, she backed off a tee shot as spectators raced by above, and then roasted a drive that led to a par. The final hole at Le Golf National was changed to a par-5 for the women, and Ko played it exactly how you should with a one-shot lead. Fairway, layup, green.

When the birdie putt dropped, her hand was already covering her mouth. Tears were already in her eyes. Tears were a theme of the day, for bronze medalist Xiyu Lin, burying her face in her partner’s shoulder. For Mariajo Uribe, her eyelids swollen after finishing her career with an eagle. And then more tears for Ko, when she finally got a view from the top level of the podium, streamed down her cheek, using her chin as a ramp. When she visited the press tent, she admitted, yes, it’s great that any further Hall of Fame questions will be along the lines of When do we celebrate?

“For it to have happened here at the Olympics, unreal,” she said. “I do feel like I’m a mythical character in a story tale. It really couldn’t have gotten any better than I could have imagined. I’ve had so many grateful things that happened in my career so far, and this really tops it.”

Shortly after Ko offered that insight, she was ushered away to other engagements, photos, drug-testing, you name it. First, though, she and her team dropped by the Olympics family lounge. Inside was a lovely surprise: 27 white roses that this time she could pick up and hold.