She’s retiring Saturday. But first, an 18-hole sprint to the Olympic podium

SAINT-QUENTIN-EN-YVELINES, France — This time Saturday, it’ll all be over. Mariajo Uribe will scoop her ball out of the 18th hole, and that’ll be it. For the final round, for the 2024 Olympics, and for her pro golf career. One more day, 18 more holes. 

What began the week as a cute story — the 34-year-old golf mom playing her final event as a pro — has slowly morphed into a certified moment. Uribe will tee off in the penultimate group Saturday not just with 18 holes to play, but in an 18-hole sprint to the medal stand. She’s two shots outside of a playoff for bronze, a thought that would have seemed ridiculous not too long ago. 

Uribe was born in Giron, Colombia, and still lives nearby, in Bucaramanga, a metro area the size of Baltimore. She won the U.S. Amateur in 2007, in Indiana, went to school at UCLA and then led a modest career on the LPGA Tour, amassing $2 million in career earnings. But unlike male golfers whose bodies and lives allow them to play relevant, competitive golf into their 50s, that isn’t alway the case on the women’s side. Uribe was ready to call it a career at 30, circling the Tokyo Games on her calendar.

“It was always at the Olympics,” she said. “The Olympics are such a big deal back home.”

But then, “COVID hit and I got pregnant and life happened.”

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Uribe went 15 months between tournaments, and when she came back, her golf was tardy. She missed 11 of her first 14 cuts and had zero top-25 finishes in her first 2.5 years of tournaments. She competed in those Tokyo games but finished 22 shots outside the podium at a silent golf course. Something about it didn’t sit right. So she and her family decided to push it. They’d extend her career a full three years’ worth of grinding and traveling and Facetiming from the road, all with the hope of represent Colombia in Paris 2024.

But at Christmas time, 2023, Uribe was on the wrong side of qualification.

So she started writing letters — the kind golfers-in-need write — requesting sponsor exemptions into tournaments that would otherwise carry on without her. She dropped down a level and began entering fields on the feeder tours — designed for up-and-coming players — where the only players covering their expenses are those who finish in the top five.

“I was just trying to get points wherever I could,” she says.

Finally, in early 2024, one of those letters was answered in the affirmative: The NSW Women’s Open. That’s NSW as in New South Wales. Come on down, they said, to Sydney, Australia — 14,000 miles from home. She birdied the 54th and final hole for a one-shot victory. The second victory of her entire career. 

When the world rankings were released the next day, she jumped up more than 250 spots, guaranteeing her place in the Olympics. “It’s been history after that,” Uribe said Friday, with a grin that says it all. She arrived last weekend and soaked it all up. She was there in the first few rows at Stade de France when Noah Lyles pushed his chest across the finish line in the 100-meter dash. She caught some of the swimming, the synchronized swimming, and couldn’t leave Paris without that Eiffel Tower beach volleyball pic. This is it, says the 196th-ranked golfer in the world. She even left her recovery boots at home and has joked with her caddie that she would buy him an “I just got fired” T-shirt.

All of it was cute and funny, right until the moment she shot 70 on Wednesday. And then shot 70 again Thursday. And then was three-under through 14 on Friday, as the leaders were coughing up bogeys, pushing that Colombian flag up the leaderboard, tied for gold. At that point, you can’t help yourself. She had to think about it. The possibility of walking off your career by walking onto the podium. Uribe knows it hasn’t been a banner Olympics for Colombia. 

“I’ve always felt so proud of my country, but the TV only comes when it’s this type of tournament,” she said, “Normal LPGA events, maybe if you win, or maybe second place they show you on TV. But other than that, people don’t really know.”

It’s a refrain we’ve heard from her fellow South American golfers this month. Their homelands are kind of aware of the Green Jacket and maybe the U.S. Open, but everyone knows the Olympics. The South American Games are one thing. (Uribe has medaled there.) The Pan-Am Games are another. (Uribe has medaled there.) But this is an entirely different beast. Uribe knows the message she’s sending back home, to the government athletics subsidy program, saying, Hey, this sport deserves funding, too. She’s been sending it subliminally all week. 

She dug into her own pockets for the yellow-red-and-blue socks she’s rocking this week, an Amazon find with a smiley-faced stitched in. She had her FootJoy’s painted appropriately. Her fingernails, too. There isn’t space for any more yellow, blue and red on her. But there is in the crowd. Each day this week has brought more and more Colombian flags to the golf course. She even brought one out onto the 1st tee box Friday, the only golfer to hold nylon up to their body like a track star. Why not? It might not be the golfiest thing to do, but the 1st tee introduction is awkward, she says. And Saturday’s her last one. Time to embrace it.

“I think it’s going to be a little hard tomorrow when that last putt falls,” she said. “No matter what happens, it’s going to be an emotional day. But right now I feel calm and excited for it.”