At the age of 26, the Korean Imbee Park has returned to the top of world golf, dethroning Lidya Ko and winning her third consecutive PGA Championship and her sixth Grand Slam tournament with a brutal demonstration of good play, quality and tremendous effectiveness, especially on the greens, to end up dominating the tournament with -19 and five ahead of her compatriot Sei Young Kim.
The challenge in this second major of the season for women’s golf was twofold: the first was to know which of the two dominators of world golf, Lidya Ko and Imbee Park, would win the battle for number one, and the other was to know if the American players would manage to win in a tournament dominated by the Korean Park in the last two editions.
The first question has been very clear since almost the first day of the tournament and even more so on the second day when the former world number one, Ko, missed the cut for the first time in 53 weeks, losing the number one that she had held in recent months and that she has barely been able to maintain with much suffering in recent weeks, where her game has not been very bright, quite the opposite of Park.
The 26-year-old Korean girl played wonderfully from the beginning to the end, with four rounds of 71, 68, 66 and 68 strokes to achieve a very comfortable victory with five strokes difference over the second classified, also Korean Sei Young Kim, who finished with fourteen strokes and four partials of 70, 68, 69 and 71 closing this Korean dominance that left the American golf the crumbs of the third place that has taken Lexi Thompson, with -12 followed by Brittany Lincicome and Morgan Preesel.
As for Azahara Muñoz, the Spaniard finished with a +3 that finally places her fifty-third in a tournament where she has clearly gone from better to worse, starting with a round of 70 strokes that worsened day by day with cards of 73, 75 and 77 strokes.
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