Nelly and Xander won Olympic gold. Now they want something more
Xander Schauffele and Nelly Korda enter Paris as reigning gold medalists.
Getty Images
THE NIGHT THAT NELLY KORDA reclaimed the title of World No. 1, she celebrated in unlikely, unglamorous fashion: with a drive across the desert. Korda had just won the Seri Pak Championship in L.A. but had previously agreed to road-trip to the following week’s LPGA tour stop in Gilbert, Ariz., with fellow pro Olivia Cowan. So after the trophy ceremony, off they went. Victory dinner was a burger at In-N-Out — side of fries, Animal-Style — and the six-hour odyssey continued.
“Huge mistake,” Korda says, thinking back on that night. “The adrenaline wore off, we got there at, like, 11:30 and my whole body was just aching.”
Korda frequently references the mental and physical toll of being in contention. She frequently references just how much she loves being in contention, too. This year? For a while, she was in contention every time she teed it up. Korda worked her way into the mix at that week’s Ford Championship, then shot Sunday’s lowest score, a seven-under 65, in tough conditions to rally to the win. It was her third in three starts. Her lead at World No. 1 had widened. And Korda would celebrate the win in the same way: with a drive across the desert. The next week’s event was in Las Vegas, so she headed north, this time alone. In-N-Out was closed for Easter Sunday, but she’d saved an almond croissant for the occasion. One more road snack — “I picked up some corn nuts and had myself a nice meal,” she says — and she was ready to roll.
There’s a much more glamorous side to Korda’s place in the cultural landscape. She’s the face of women’s golf, a generational talent with a picture-perfect swing. She has blue-chip endorsement deals with the likes of Nike, Delta and Goldman Sachs. She shared the red carpet with global A-listers at this spring’s Met Gala. Opportunities and invitations have stacked up almost as fast as her first-place finishes. But she’s most comfortable prepping for the next one, alone at home on the range. And when she wins?
“I get in the car and I blare music,” she says. “That’s kind of my happy place. That’s how I celebrate.”
So she drove into the night, arriving in Vegas satisfied and exhausted. She’d go on to win that tournament, too.
THE NIGHT THAT XANDER SCHAUFFELE WON this year’s PGA Championship, at Valhalla GC, in Louisville, Ky., he couldn’t sleep. He and his wife, Maya, had hosted a little party at their rental home there. They’d poured beers into the massive Wanamaker Trophy. Emptied it. Filled it again. On the course, Schauffele is locked in and inscrutable, but after years of close calls — 12 previous top 10s in majors and six top fives — he’d finally broken through, and it was worth celebrating. That night, as he watched a replay of his birdie putt on Valhalla’s 18th hole, the exhilaration of the win was unmistakable, but two more dominant emotions overtook him. “Relief,” he says, “and validation.”
The friends left between 2 and 3 a.m., but Schauffele was wired.
“I was just so fired up,” he says.
In addition to the night’s festivities, one moment of genuine satisfaction stands out.
“It was all the way to 5 a.m., and I’m still up. I remember I was brushing my teeth. I looked up and just had a moment with myself in the mirror,” he says laughing but, still, in all seriousness. “And I was like, ‘You did it.’”
THERE ARE COMPELLING SIMILARITIES between these two, the season’s hottest golfers not named Scottie, who also happen to be the reigning gold medalists entering the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris — and you don’t have to squint terribly hard to see them. Both Schauffele and Korda are diligent workers. They’re low-key and well liked. Both use phrases like “I let my clubs do the talking.” They’re obsessed with process. They’re the kids of European immigrants who’d chased Olympic dreams of their own before moving their families to the States and pulling up front-row seats to watch their children pursue greatness.
Though Nelly’s father, Petr, a former top-tier Czech pro tennis player, is more routinely cited as the force behind his daughter’s competitive career, he never competed in the Olympic Games. Nelly’s mother, Regina Rajchrtová, also a retired tennis professional, represented Czechoslovakia in the 1988 Summer Games.
While no contemporary golfers grew up dreaming of Olympic glory — the global competition was golf-free from 1904 until 2016 — in the Korda household the Games were must-see TV.
“It was such a family thing for us,” Nelly remembers. “Every four years we’d sit in front of the television and watch every sport, especially track and field, gymnastics and swimming. But I never dreamed of standing on a podium and seeing my country’s flag get raised. I never thought I’d have that opportunity. And then, when I finally did, I had this rush of emotion that I’ve never had to this day. It was just such a surreal and amazing experience.”
What made Nelly’s ride at the 2020 Games in Tokyo even more satisfying was having her sister, six-time LPGA winner Jessica Korda, at her side. Jess managed to secure one of Team U.S.A.’s final qualifying spots, thus earning the title of Olympian that neither Petr nor Nelly’s brother Sebastian — currently the 22nd-ranked men’s tennis player in the world — can lay claim to. (Sebastian, maintaining a laser focus on hard-court season, has actually turned down spots on the last two Olympic teams.)
“It’s our girls club,” Nelly says, cheekily.
SCHAUFFELE’S FATHER, STEFAN, had been an aspiring Olympian himself. A car crash on his way to training one day dashed his dreams of competing as a decathlete for his native Germany. But in his son, he too saw the potential for greatness.
“It’s such a unique thing for me specifically, because my dad was the person who taught me how to play golf, and he gave me all the wisdom he had based on his own experiences,” Xander says. “I was the apprentice working my way up under his mentorship. So then, y’know, being able to deliver this thing that the master always wanted — it sounds really corny, really stupid, but it feels like that’s what I did. The fact that the master was my dad makes it that much more wild.”
Given golf ’s fickle nature, anyone in the men’s and women’s fields could have won gold at the 2020 Games. There are Cinderella stories all the time on the PGA and LPGA tours. But the title of gold-medal Olympian is so big, so significant and so scarce — you hold the throne for four years — it would have felt strange for a random journeyman to emerge that summer as champion. Korda and Schauffele were anything but random. At the time, in August 2021 (the 2020 Games were pushed back a year due to the pandemic), she was World No. 1 and he was World No. 5; each had a knack for contending in big-time events and possessed boundless potential. Unlike some of their peers, who opted out of the Olympics, they jumped at the chance to represent their country and their sport. That made them deserving champions and ideal representatives for golf on its new global stage.
Incredibly, their wins only look better with time. The 2024 season has been a high-water mark for both players. Korda has been historically — preposterously — good, winning six of seven starts at one point in the season and taking such a commanding lead in the Rolex Rankings that her points total reached a height more than double that of World No. 2 Lilia Vu. Schauffele was already playing the best and most consistent golf of his career before winning at Valhalla, a victory that instantly relieved him of the dreaded best-player-to-never-win-a-major rap and recast his past close calls as “good experiences” rather than “missed opportunities.” Then he did it again at Royal Troon at last month’s Open, cementing himself as not just a regular major contender but a guy who can close out the big ones, like he did in Tokyo with a 100-yard wedge shot to two feet at the last.
Now Schauffele is in Paris and Korda will be soon. The men’s competition kicks off Thursday, Aug. 1. The women start play the following Wednesday, Aug. 7. They’ll each be among the favorites to contend and defend.
WITH A 2024 RUN AS GOOD AND LONG as Korda’s was to start the year, it’s not unreasonable to think that fatigue or pressure or even a lapse in motivation could set in. Is it possible to tire of winning? Probably not. But interestingly, the ultimate high of her year came just before its ultimate low — in Lancaster, Pa., at the 2024 U.S. Women’s Open.
If you want to learn about golf — watch Team Sweden, the Olympics odd couple
“Seeing everyone out there to watch, seeing the little kids, hearing from their moms and dads that I inspire their children — that, to me, is the best part,” Korda says of that week and her runaway success. “There was this one girl who I guess had watched me in 2021 at the KPMG and waited so long just to see me and meet me again. Her dad told me they’d saved a spot on her flag [for my autograph], and when I finally saw her I randomly had two gloves in my back pocket, so I gave her one and she just started crying. As I walked away I started getting tears in my eyes because I was just, like — to be able to have that type of influence, it’s just unbelievable.”
Then came the agony. Korda, the heavy pre-tournament favorite, made a septuple-bogey 10 on the third hole of her first round, chipping three times consecutively into the creek that guards Lancaster CC’s diabolical 12th green. She’d never experienced anything like it.
“That mistake, that moment, it just kept going,” she says. “I just kept doing it over and over and over again. It was to the point where I was like, Okay, you know what? I’ve gotten good breaks. I’ve won six out of eight of my events this year. I think that this is the golf gods telling me it’s time to give back a little.”
Korda made a valiant charge for the cut line on Friday but fell a few shots short of playing on the weekend, a shocking result in the biggest event on the LPGA schedule. More disappointment came in the weeks that followed: two more missed cuts. Even worse, she suffered a dog-bite injury after the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship and missed her next event after that. She finished T26 at the Evian, perfectly respectable were it not for the impossibly high standard she’d already set.
So it was back to Bradenton, Fla., to home base, where there are very few pro golfers and plenty of range balls. Back to building. Just the way Korda likes it. That’s where she can go off the grid and get to work chasing that next dose of quiet satisfaction, that next well-earned almond croissant, that next music-blaring road trip that comes with victory.
SCHAUFFELE IS CHASING SOMETHING, TOO. For as well as his year has gone — he two majors and 12 top 10s in his first 17 starts — he still has his eyes set on World No. 1. Scheffler — himself an Olympian for the first time, and this week’s betting favorite — has opened up a Korda-sized gap atop the OWGR. In his post-PGA-win press conference, Schauffele spun a vivid analogy: Scheffler sits at the mountain’s peak, and the victory in Valhalla allowed Xander to at least pause and enjoy a beer a ways down from that summit. Asked if he believes he’s the closest, among Tour pros, to dethroning Scheffler, he served up another analogy.
“What’s it called in cycling, the peloton?” Schauffele said. “I’m currently second in the world, but I feel like I’m at the tip of the peloton, with binoculars, looking way ahead at him. He’s definitely a staple in the top two on every leaderboard each week.” Victory at Troon marked further progress. But Schauffele, too, enjoys having mountain left to climb.
Schauffele’s strides haven’t come by chance. In the offseason, the 30-year-old made significant distance gains off the tee and now ranks inside the top 10 in clubhead speed. And though his father remains a trusted advisor, Schauffele is now working with GOLF Top 100 Teacher Chris Como, whose insights have been a game changer.
“He’s helped me understand things I didn’t really understand before in my swing,” Schauffele says. “The dos and don’ts, the whys. And those sleepless nights where I had gone down the rabbit hole trying to figure things out on my own, he’s come in and really explained a lot of it to me and makes sense to me, and I’m able to take it and apply it.”
With greater success comes a bigger platform and bigger questions on broader topics. In men’s professional golf that means politics and persistent queries about the game’s future. Schauffele is about as straight a shooter as they come — “I typically try not to lie, because it’s just a really bad web you spin for yourself, and then you don’t even know where you are,” he says — but he has no interest in going much deeper on pro golf’s power struggle than he already has.
“What’s gotten me here is exactly the fact that I kept my head down and didn’t dive into this off-course stuff that everyone really wants to talk about,” he says. He’s staying in his process. He’s focused on patience. He’s readying himself for constant improvement over the course of years. He wants one major to turn into more. He wants another gold medal, too.
Korda also covets repeat gold, but, like Schauffele, she knows there’s no faking the work required to get there. The good news?
“I absolutely love this game,” she says. “Some people get tired of it because they lose the love for it. But, like, you’re always going to be motivated to be better if you love something. I’m not a golf nerd; I should know more golf history and I should know more about, like, architects. But I love competing and I love playing.
“Like, yesterday I went out and I was by myself and I made an eagle and I just screamed and started running around the green. I just feel like a kid when I’m out there by myself. I’m just, like, I’m 25 years old and I get to do this as my job?”
It’s an attitude as good as gold.
Latest In News
