A pair of former tennis hotshots who turned to golf lead the Amundi Evian Championship heading into the final round. Gabriela Ruffels and Cara Gainer, who both experienced burnout on the courts, are knotted at 11 under on the shores of Lake Geneva, chased by a group that’s as diverse as it is packed.
Ruffels, the promising Aussie whose parents were both professional tennis players, has yet to win on the LPGA, while England’s Gainer won for the first time on the LET to start 2025. Both started playing golf at age 14, the same age Jeeno Thitikul became the youngest winner on the LET.
“I mean, tennis was, I guess, my first love,” said 29-year-old Gainer, who had no designs to play golf professionally while in school. In fact, while at Cardiff University, she had an interview for a job in golf outside the ropes with IMG.
“It kind of took a turn, and I actually never got that job,” she noted in her post-round interview, “which I laugh about now because things could have really taken a bit of a different role.”
Gainer, who once dreamed of winning a grand slam event, turned professional in golf at the start of 2020 at the age of 24.
Ruffels, meanwhile, was a top-three tennis player in her age group in Australia, a national champion for 12 and under and a member of the national squad. Her heroes back then were Kim Clijsters and Roger Federer.
Just last week, she traveled to London to attend Wimbledon as a fan.
It was only a decade ago that Ruffels played her first 18-hole round with her dad’s clubs. She’d go on to win the 2019 U.S. Women’s Amateur title five years later. Gainer won the 2017 English Women’s Open Match Play Championship not long after she decided to pursue golf full time.
Ruffels and Gainer are outliers in a field of specialized athletes who’ve trained most of their lives to do one thing.
“I guess I just kind of knew in the back of my mind I had the ability,” said Gainer. “It’s just I was very far behind in experience compared to a lot of the players that had been through college and all that. I felt when I came on Tour to begin with, I was really behind in terms of tournament experience.”
Indeed, Gainer is getting started at an age when many of the LPGA’s best are thinking about an exit plan.
Ruffels, 25, is making her second Evian Championship appearance while Gainer is making her first. A victory tomorrow would give Gainer an LPGA card. While she’s new to Evian the major, Gainer took a share of third at the LET’s Jabra Ladies Open at Evian Golf Resort earlier this year.
Meanwhile, Ruffels’ experience factor is getting a significant boost from caddie Travis Wilson, longtime looper for Stacy Lewis, who isn’t in the field.
Of course, both newcomers will have to get past the two favorites going into Sunday – Minjee Lee and Thitikul, who trail by one at 10 under alongside LPGA winners Grace Kim and Somi Lee.
Minjee Lee, the 2021 Evian champion, recently won her third major title at the KPMG Women’s PGA while world No. 2 Thitikul is eager to shed the best-player-without-a-major moniker.
Only six players have become four-time major winners since 2000: Karrie Webb, Annika Sorenstam, Se Ri Pak, Meg Mallon, Yani Tseng and Inbee Park.
“I’m usually always pretty relaxed,” said Lee, “but I definitely feel like I have a different mentality and maybe a little bit different fire in me after KPMG.”
Two players are two back in a share of ninth – Yuri Yoshida (63) and Casandra Alexander (69). According LPGA stats, over the past 10 seasons, 80 percent of the tour’s major winners have been within two shots of the lead entering the final round.
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