OTSU, Japan — Japanese golfers Nasa Hataoka and Yuna Araki sat atop the leaderboard after Saturday’s third round of the LPGA’s Toto Japan Classic.<\/p>\n
Hataoka has shared the lead in each of the first three rounds, with different golfers each time.<\/p>\n
Hataoka shot a 4-under 68 and Araki was in at 7-under 65 — both at 15-under 201 — at the Seta Golf Club in western Japan.<\/p>\n
Three more Japanese players were just off the pace going into Sunday’s final round. Miyu Yamashita, who won the Maybank Championship in Malaysia last week, carded a 68 and was one stroke behind. She was followed by Shuri Sakuma (69), who is three back, and Ai Suzuki (70), four off the lead.<\/p>\n
Defending champion Rio Takeda, who has not been in contention all week, had a 68 and was nine shots behind.<\/p>\n
Minjee Lee of Australia, one of the highest profile players in the field, was 14 behind the leaders after a 74.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OTSU, Japan — Japanese golfers Nasa Hataoka and Yuna Araki sat atop the leaderboard after Saturday’s third round…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":278969,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[427,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-278968","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-golf","8":"tag-golf","9":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=278968"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278968\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/278969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=278968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=278968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=278968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}