Striving to crown her stellar LPGA Tour season with player-of-the-year honours, Lee compiled a flawless seven-under-par 65 to be sitting just one shot behind surprise Thai leader Arpichaya Yubol.<\/p>\n
Australia’s world No.4 collected seven birdies – three on the front nine and four more on the back – at Qizhong Garden Golf Club to share second spot with world No.1 Jeeno Thitikul, Koreans Ina Yoon and Jenny Shin and American Jenny Bae.<\/p>\n
Another 10 players are within four strokes of the lead in a thrilling start to the all-important Asian swing.<\/p>\n
While Lee was steady as she goes in an effortless display of supreme ball striking, Thitikul recovered from three over after two holes with a stunning 10-birdie blitz in her final 14 holes as the Thai superstar continues her ding-dong battle for player-of-the-year honours.<\/p>\n
Thitikul and Lee are first and second with seven events remaining, including the season-ending $US11 million ($A16.71 million) Tour Championship in Florida from November 20-23.<\/p>\n
After capturing a third career major at the Women’s PGA Championship in June, Lee already has the ANNIKA award in the bag as major player of 2025.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
But the 29-year-old is bidding to complete a golden double, as well as top the season’s money list.<\/p>\n
Lee enjoys a $US490,000 ($A745,000) lead over Thitikul in that contest, with the pair to resume their battle in the marquee second-round grouping on Friday with defending champion Ruoning Yin.<\/p>\n
Yin has much ground to make up, the Chinese opening with a one-under 71 to be seven shots off the pace.<\/p>\n
Lee’s compatriots Gabriela Ruffels and Robyn Choi are tied for 17th following three-under 69 starts on Thursday.<\/p>\n
Karis Davidson had been right in the mix at five under until dropping a shot on her 15th hole, then racking up a dreaded double-bogey seven at the par-5 last.<\/p>\n
Davidson settled for a two-under 70 to share 27th position with fellow Australians Cassie Porter and Steph Kyriacou.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Striving to crown her stellar LPGA Tour season with player-of-the-year honours, Lee compiled a flawless seven-under-par 65 to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":199874,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[566],"tags":[64,63,755,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-199873","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-golf","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-golf","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199873"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199873\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/199874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}