Yamashita assumed control of the tournament with a seven-under-par round of 65 on Friday morning and led from that moment on.<\/p>\n
She briefly shared top spot with playing partner A Lim Kim early in her final round, but the South Korean’s birdie at the second was quickly followed by consecutive bogeys.<\/p>\n
Hull, who propelled herself into contention with a six-under 66 on Saturday, quickly emerged as the main challenger to world number 15 Yamashita.<\/p>\n
They both played their first nine holes in three under par, meaning Yamashita reached the turn three shots clear.<\/p>\n
Hull refused to relent and continued to attack, closing the gap to one shot until a costly trip to a fairway bunker on the 16th.<\/p>\n
A couple of groups further back, Yamashita stayed remarkably composed and was able to limit the damage of her rare errors – superbly saving par with a lengthy putt at the 14th.<\/p>\n
With the knowledge that a bogey on the par-five 18th would be enough for victory, there were some nervous moments when Yamashita found the rough with her first two shots – before a safe chip onto the green set up a par that confirmed she would be the third Japanese winner of the Women’s Open.<\/p>\n
Speaking via a translator at the trophy presentation, she said: “To win such a historic tournament in front of all these amazing fans is such an incredible feeling.<\/p>\n
“To be part of such a moment in history is something very special,” added Yamashita – who collected a winner’s prize of $1.462m (\u00a31.1m).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Yamashita assumed control of the tournament with a seven-under-par round of 65 on Friday morning and led from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":40993,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[566],"tags":[64,63,755,85],"class_list":["post-40992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-golf","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40992","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=40992"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40992\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}