There are courses that the women’s game visits and courses that feel like an arrival, and Riviera, this week, is firmly the latter. The 81st U.S. Women’s Open got under way on Thursday on the kikuyu fairways of Pacific Palisades, the first time the championship has been staged at one of American golf’s most storied venues. Riviera has hosted men’s majors and decades of Tour golf, and the sight of the best women in the world walking up that long, downhill par-five first hole carries a weight that goes beyond a single week. With a record purse of 12.5 million dollars on the line, the championship has chosen its stage carefully.
Korda arrives carrying last year
The headline name, as it tends to be, is Nelly Korda, and she comes to Riviera with a particular kind of motivation. Twelve months ago at Erin Hills she finished a shot behind, runner-up at the one championship that has so far eluded her. For a player of her standing the U.S. Women’s Open remains a conspicuous gap on the résumé, and the manner of last year’s near miss has clearly stayed with her.
This is not a player short of form. Korda has already won three times in 2026 and claimed her second major at the Chevron Championship in April, and she returns to the top of the world ranking as the obvious favourite. What she does not yet have is this trophy, and the gap between being the best player in the game and being the U.S. Women’s Open champion is the sort of thing that gnaws at the very good. Riviera, with its premium on precise iron play and patient course management, ought to suit her. The question, as ever at a U.S. Open, is whether the most talented player can also be the most disciplined one for four straight days.
Stark gave the trophy back
The defending champion is Maja Stark, and her story is one of the more endearing in the women’s game. The Swede won at Erin Hills last year while still on the fringes of the conversation, a major title arriving before anyone had quite penciled her in as a contender. She has since admitted she handed the trophy back partly because having it sitting in her room felt strange, the response of someone still adjusting to what she had done.
The aftermath was not seamless. Stark missed the cut in five of her next seven starts after the win, the familiar story of a player learning to carry the expectation that comes with a major. The encouraging part is what has happened since. She has climbed to 23rd in the world, made seven cuts in eight starts this season and finished 16th in Cincinnati three weeks ago. She arrives not as a fluke defending a one-off, but as a player who has steadied herself and earned the right to be taken seriously again.
A field with old faces and new
Beyond the top of the leaderboard, the week carries its share of sentiment. Michelle Wie West has come out of retirement to play her first major since the 2023 U.S. Open, using the final year of her exemption from her 2014 victory in this very championship. She is 36 now, a mother of two, and nobody expects her to contend. That is rather the point. A U.S. Women’s Open at a venue like Riviera is exactly the stage on which a player of her history deserves a proper farewell, and the patrons will give her one.
The supporting cast is deep, as it always is. Jeeno Thitikul is among the featured groups, and the strength of the global game means a dozen players could win without anyone calling it a surprise. That is the modern women’s game in a sentence. The depth has caught up with the star power, and a major championship is now very hard to call.
What is not in doubt is the setting. Riviera asks honest questions of any golfer, rewards the player who can shape a ball and control its flight, and punishes the one who gets greedy. Four rounds here will produce a worthy champion. Whether that champion ends Korda’s wait, extends Stark’s unlikely chapter, or comes from somewhere else entirely, the championship could hardly have asked for a better place to find out.