HANGZHOU: When Aditi Ashok went to sleep on Saturday night, she didn't know how much she was leading by. She was thinking 'six or seven'. The game plan on Sunday was pretty simple. Don't change too many things, do the basics right and walk away with gold. That may be rudimentary but you would have to do pretty badly across 18 holes to squander a seven-shot lead.
However, she found a pretty bad time to serve up one of her worst rounds of golf ever to 'lose gold' to Thailand's Arpichaya Yubol. If her Saturday was a golfing masterclass (11-under par), Sunday turned out to be a disaster (five-over). In all, she finished 17-under, two strokes behind Yubol. Even though her radar was off by many metres on the final day, what really cost her was finding the water on the par-three 16th hole. She finished with a double bogey to lose the lead that she had had from day one. On the par-five 17th, Yubol found a birdie (Aditi managed a par). Aditi's gold was kept on champagne on ice on Saturday. The Thai athlete performed a heist a few hours later.
After the round, the 25-year-old admitted that she sees winning silver as 'gold lost'. "It was definitely a gold lost for me," she said. "I guess I was leading by six or seven. Definitely, anybody would see it as a loss and it was my tournament to lose and I basically did that. Credit to her as well and she played great. She shot 4 under in these conditions which is pretty good. She had the chance to catch up from the back and she played a good round. She forced me to play well and I didn't so that's definitely a gold lost."
Aditi, who finished fourth at the Olympics in Tokyo after being in the top three for long periods of time, did opine that having a big lead perhaps threw her off slightly. "Yeah, I am not gonna lie," the Bengalurean said. "It wasn't easy. The way your mind works is when you are behind, you are always thinking of the good stuff you can do to catch up. But when you are leading, I don't know if it's good or not, but the mind looks at what can go wrong. Not that that's what happened. I just played badly too."
If she hardly missed the fairway on Saturday, her Sunday was littered with missing the greens. "I was just trying to keep it in play or stay in position but somehow I just missed a lot of drives. I just couldn't fix it or figure it out. I didn't want to hit three woods and get conservative. I just wanted to keep hitting the driver and that did get fixed by the end. That was the only thing that put me out of it. I don't think my mindset changed as much. Till the 16th (hole), I was fine and I was playing okay. It's just the double bogey that got me out of it. A little different but similar to the first day. It was more windy. If you hit bad shots, you can get away with it sometimes but if you hit them in the wind, it can get even worse. That's what happened on a few holes."