Sunday’s singles at Bernardus Golf had been building to this for two days, and when it finally arrived the winning point did not come from one of Europe’s seasoned campaigners but from a rookie who had spent the first two days wondering whether she belonged on the team sheet at all. Lottie Woad closed out Auston Kim 2 and 1, holing a putt from two feet on the 17th to take Europe to the 14½ points needed, and the Solheim Cup came home to the continent for another two years. Carlota Ciganda finished the job in style shortly after, beating Jennifer Kupcho 4 and 2 to push the final margin to 15-13.
It was a result that looked unlikely at several points across the week. Europe had shared the honours through the foursomes and fourballs sessions, and Saturday’s play ended locked at 8-8 after Kupcho produced two remarkable long putts in the final match on the course to snatch a half point back for the Americans. Singles day, though, belonged almost entirely to the home side. Europe won the morning’s opening exchanges comfortably and never really let the United States back into the match, closing out point after point on a rain-softened course that suited the calmer, more patient style several of the European players had shown all week.
Woad’s contribution to that finish came with more baggage than the closing scoreline suggests. She and Charley Hull had been paired together for all four of the opening sessions and left them without a win between them, managing only a single half point from four attempts. That kind of run tends to sit heavily on a rookie, and Woad said afterwards that she had felt she was playing good golf without the results to show for it, and worried she was letting her team down. Singles gave her a clean slate and she took it, playing steady, unspectacular golf against Kim and closing the door at the first opportunity once the match reached the 17th.
LOTTIE’S MOMENT
LOTTIE’S MOMENT 🇪🇺🏴 pic.twitter.com/9iDPE10XFu
— LPGA (@LPGA) September 13, 2026
There was a second story running alongside the scoreline all week, and it belonged to the captain rather than any of the players. Anna Nordqvist had announced her retirement from competitive golf only a fortnight before the match, and Bernardus turned out to be her last week leading a European team from the sidelines. A winning send-off is not something captains get to choose, and plenty of hugely respected ones have finished on the wrong end of a scoreline through no real fault of their own. Nordqvist got the ending her career deserved instead, watching her side close out the win in front of a home crowd that had been loud and partisan from the first tee time on Friday morning.
Angela Stanford’s American side will look back on this one with mixed feelings. The team was competitive across both team sessions and Kupcho’s Saturday putts were the kind of moment that can flip a match’s momentum entirely, yet singles day exposed a gap that the foursomes and fourballs results had mostly disguised. Europe’s depth through the middle and lower reaches of the singles order proved decisive, picking up points in matches that looked evenly poised on paper long before the back nine arrived.
What it means going forward
Two-year cycles in this event have a habit of turning on personnel changes as much as anything that happens on the course, and this Cup will be remembered partly for how well several rookies performed under genuine pressure. Woad’s clinching point sits alongside a handful of other debut performances from the European side that suggest the queue of talent behind the more established names is not thinning out any time soon. The Americans, for their part, will have to work out how a team with real firepower at the top of its order kept finding itself short of points once singles reached its closing stages, a question that usually takes a full review of pairings and preparation rather than a single afternoon’s soul-searching to answer properly.
For now, the trophy goes back into European hands, a rookie who thought she was struggling turns out to have delivered the most important two feet of putting all week, and a captain who called time on her own career gets to do it with a trophy in her hands rather than a runner-up’s medal.