After Olympic heartbreak, a ‘painful’ Jon Rahm told us everything

You didn’t need a leaderboard to know what was about to happen, but a glimpse on Sunday afternoon in Paris removed all doubt. The men’s Olympic golf tournament was over. Paris had anointed a Gold Medal winner. His name? Jon Rahm. “Yeah, when I got to 10 and 11, I looked at the board and I was at 14 and Jon had got to 20,” Rory McIlroy said. “So I was like …”

He paused.

“I didn’t think I had a chance.”

Rahm was four shots clear of the field at the time, playing the style of solar-eclipse golf we’ve seen cast darkness over contenders of all kinds of golf tournaments, including two major championships and a handful of Ryder Cups. You know this kind of Jon Rahm golf: Where the hole seems massive and golf’s challenges seem easy and he seems inevitable.

We all knew it was coming, which was why it was so shocking when … it didn’t. Rahm lost, collapsed really, blowing his lead with back-to-back bogeys in the moment the rest of the field started charging. In about five seconds he’d dropped from the solo lead into a battle for the Bronze. By the time it was over, he’d choked the fight for third, too, tumbling with an ugly double bogey to a soul-battering T5 finish.