It’s been 380 days since Lydia Ko won. After a stunning 2024, her last victory was at the 2025 HSBC Women’s World Championship. Now that she is set to return at the Fortinet Founders Cup after almost 3 weeks of break, Ko explained how she is handling the pressure to get back to the winner’s circle.
“Stacy Lewis once told me that—I think in like 2017 or 2018, I was struggling, and she was like, ‘Don’t try to be the person that I was when I was world No. 1 in 2015 or 2016. ‘I think that was just the perfect way to put it; I’m never going to be that same person, and all I can do is be the best person and best player I am in the present. And I think her saying that to me was like a wake-up call,” Lydia Ko told the media, ahead of the $3 million tournament.
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When 15-year-old Ko won her first LPGA event as an amateur at the 2012 Canadian Women’s Open, she was paired with Lewis, who offered her words of encouragement during the final round. Since then, Ko just tries to ‘go with it.’ The advice holds significance because Lewis went through something similar.
Despite being #1, Lewis was mired in a winless streak and near misses. In early 2015 alone, she finished second in three out of five starts and recorded five total runner-up finishes during a stretch where she was frequently right there but unable to secure a trophy.
The pattern is amazingly similar in Ko’s own life. During her early career, Ko was a genuine sporting phenomenon, amassing 14 LPGA wins, including two majors, and becoming the youngest world No. 1 at age 17. Today, the situation is markedly different. But Ko has struggled before already.
2023 was the low point of her career: only 2 top 10 finishes in 20 starts and 0 trophies. The worst moment of it all was her career-worst 82 in Vancouver. However, she experienced a remarkable surge in 2024, winning the Hilton Grand Vacations Tournament of Champions to kick off the season, followed by the AIG Women’s Open and the Kroger Queen City Championship. She also won an Olympic gold medal and secured $3.2M in a single year.
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Now, it is again a year without a win. But she can turn things around, as she’s now experienced both sides of the rainbow, a feeling of “scar tissue” that builds up over many long years.
“I think there is a very fine line. Because when you first come on tour, you’re almost naïve to everything, and you don’t have the scar tissue from golf. You’re just out there free, just trusting yourself. Now, I can handle the bad situations a lot better. I can’t fight having nerves, but I can handle those things better.”
BMW Ladies Championship Round 2 WONJU, SOUTH KOREA, OCT 21: Lydia Ko of New Zealand at hole 11 during the second round of BMW Ladies Championship in Oak Valley Country Club in Wonju, South Korea on October 21, 2022. Wonju South Korea 7641_265151 Copyright: xSeokyongxLee/PentaxPressx. Image Courtesy: IMAGO
And with a career goal of a Career Grand Slam, needing only the Chevron Championship and the U.S. Women’s Open to complete the set, what can be a better starting point than the Fortinet Founders Cup? Ko has an exceptional history at this event, recording five top-10 finishes and a solo runner-up finish in 2016.
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Still, Ko is not the only player to have struggled through a jarring transition from dominance to drought.
Parallel path of Nelly Korda, but of course with a different mindset
Nelly Korda experienced a statistically strong but surprisingly winless 2025 LPGA season. After a superhuman 2024 season in which she won seven times, including five in a row, the current #2 went 0-for-20 in the 2025 season. She remained among the top 5 in scoring average, strokes gained off the tee, and tee-to-green, performing similarly to her 2024 season in many metrics but still struggling to add another trophy. She eventually lost her #1 place to Jeeno Thitikul in August.
Korda admitted that success is never linear and noted the frustration of having better statistics—scoring average, off the tee, and putting—in 2025 than during her dominant 2024, yet ending the year with zero trophies.
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“The highs are probably like seeing the great flashes in my game where I’m very excited about the work that I put in. Then some of the lows are like every girl can say out here, every pro can say that, you put so much time and effort into your craft, and you just don’t play well. You just do it over and over and over again. Occasionally, you just go a little crazy,” she said, reflecting on her trophyless year.
The drought finally broke for Nelly at the Hilton Grand Vacations Tournament of Champions 2026. But for Ko, the wait continued.
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