Ryu, Thompson highlight top field at The Evian Championship (Sep 12, 2017)
The LPGA Tour heads to France and the south shore of Lake Geneva this week for The Evian Championship, in which a stacked field of 22 of the world's top 25 players will try to win the fifth and final major championship of the season.
World No. 1 So Yeon Ryu, the 27-year-old from South Korea, heads the roster of players that includes newly elevated second-ranked player Lexi Thompson, third-ranked Sung Hyun Park of South Korea (the erstwhile rookie of the year frontrunner) and all four players who have claimed this major championship -- Suzann Pettersen of Norway (2013), Lydia Ko of New Zealand (2015) and Hyo Joo Jim (2014) and In Gee Chun (2016) of South Korea.
The field includes 92 of the top 100 players on the LPGA money List, and the winners of a combined 51 majors.
The golfers will tee it up beginning Thursday at the Evian Resort Golf Club, in Evian-les-Bains, France, which will play to a par of 71 and at 6,479 yards. On the line is a total purse of $3.65 million, with $547,500 and 625 Race to the CME Globe points going to the winner of the 72-hole event.
This tournament, which was born in 1994 as the Evian Masters, became an official LPGA Tour event in 2000 and was elevated to a major in 2013.
Past Evian Masters winners in the field are Laura Davies of England (1995 & 1996), Juli Inkster (2003), Paula Creamer (2005), Karrie Webb of Australia (2006), Natalie Gulbis (2007) and Ai Miyazato of Japan (2009 & 2011), who is retiring after this championship.
Ryu is chasing her third win of the year and her second career major championship victory, following the ANA Inspiration in April. She has now been atop of the Rolex Women's World Golf Rankings for 12 consecutive weeks.
"Being world No. 1 is a lot of pressure," Ryu said. "Finally I realized how much it is -- how tough it is. But another thing I realized is that I don't want to, like, give up. I don't want to just run away. I just want to put on this pressure, and I want to fight through."
If Ryu can take the victory on Sunday, she will join countrywoman In-Kyung Kim as the season's only three-time winner. Ryu currently leads the Rolex Player of the Year standings by three points over Thompson and also sits atop the standings for Rolex ANNIKA Major Award honors.
Defending champion Chun captured her first Evian Championship title by four strokes over Park and Ryu. Chun's 72-hole score of 21-under-par 263 is the lowest major championship score in the history of men's and women's golf, and she went on to win the year's Louise Suggs Rolex Rookie of the Year honors.
Thompson enters The Evian Championship in peak form after posting her second victory of 2017 at the Indy Women in Tech Championship last week in Indianapolis. She is the only American with multiple wins this season and the only player on the LPGA Tour with wins in each of the last five seasons.
While many of the world's top players took last week off to prepare for this event, Thompson played and won. Now she's dealing with the flight to France and the jet lag that comes with such travel.
"Even though it's only a six-hour time difference, it's hard to get used to," the 22-year-old Thompson said. "I think I slept for like 11 hours last night. I've never slept that long, in a while. It is definitely hard to get used to the time change and just a lot of travel and having to play golf the next day, but it's something I'm kind of used to.
"I've done the travel since I was 15-years old going out of the country and everything, so I'm pretty used to it."
If she wins this week, Thompson would join Pettersen (2013) as the only players to win both The Evian Championship and the event preceding. The other three players to win the event prior went on to miss the cut at Evian Resort Golf Club.
If Thompson can forge victory again this year, she'll be the first American with three or more wins in a season since Stacy Lewis won three times in 2014.
The Evian Championship is the 26th event in the season-long Race to the CME Globe. Thompson currently leads the standings with 3,192 points, followed by Ryu (2,652 points) and Park (2,563 points). This week could provide a major shakeup to the Race standings, as the five LPGA major championships carry 25 percent more value.
After The Evian Championship, the LPGA Tour will take a week off before heading to Auckland and the McKayson New Zealand Women's Open.
It's then on to seven consecutive weeks in Asia, with the Tour visiting the People's Republic of China, South Korea, Chinese Taipei, Malaysia and Japan, before heading back to the United States for the season-ending CME Group Tour Championship, in Naples, Fla.
