Céline Boutier, the most successful French women’s golfer ever, has spent much of her adult life outside of her home country.
At 18, she left France to study psychology and play golf at Duke University, winning the N.C.A.A. team title and becoming the world’s top-ranked amateur.
After college, she moved to Dallas to live near her swing coach Cameron McCormick, who had helped Jordan Spieth scale the heights and win majors. Since 2018, she has been a full-time member of the L.P.G.A. Tour, reaching No. 3 in the rankings last year.
But Boutier, now 30, made the most of one of her rare moments in France: winning her first major last year at the Amundi Evian Championship by a commanding six strokes and getting doused with Champagne on the 18th green by friends and fellow players.
“I think it was the most powerful moment of my career so far,” she said in a telephone interview from Dallas. “Just because it was something that I had wanted to win for so long, and it was a tournament that I really watched when I was young. I was always drawn to it, and so it honestly felt a bit surreal to be the one at the center of this award ceremony that I had watched so often with the trophies and the national anthem.”
She was the first French golfer to win the title on the picturesque course at the Evian Resort Golf Club. Boutier became the third Frenchwoman to win a major after Catherine Lacoste at the 1967 U.S. Women’s Open and Patricia Meunier-Lebouc at the 2003 Kraft Nabisco Championship. Lacoste, the daughter of tennis star and entrepreneur René Lacoste, is the only amateur to have won the U.S. Women’s Open.
Boutier will defend her title this week, while also preparing for a much bigger French occasion: the Summer Olympics, where the women’s golf event will be staged in the Paris suburbs from Aug. 7 to 10 at Le Golf National, a course Boutier knows well.
“I have played it many times,” she said. “We had the French championships there every summer, and I was based in a training center there for a year during my last year of high school. So, we trained there nearly every day.”
Boutier, an unimposing 5-foot-5 on a tour full of big hitters, wins with precision, not power, and she considers herself an overachiever.
She and her younger brother, Kevin, were introduced to golf at the same time by their father, Christopher, a late convert to golf who took them to the Paris Country Club, a course in the Paris suburb of Rueil-Malmaison. She was 6 and Kevin was 3, but she said her brother showed the most natural talent.
“In our early childhood, everyone could see that it came to him easily, but because of that, he did not need to work,” she said. “I was a bit the opposite. Everything I achieved had to come from hard work because it did not come as naturally. But of course, there are different talents in life. In terms of pure golfing talent, I don’t think I had that much, but there are other talents like determination, drive and perseverance. Those are the things that help you compensate if, say, your hand-eye coordination is not at an extraordinary level.”
Boutier’s determination is clear in the results: Despite ranking 86th in driving distance, at 256 yards, with her precision, she has recorded top-10 finishes in all five women’s majors and won six L.P.G.A. Tour titles, four of them in 2023, the season that took her to another level.
At home, she became the first golfer to win the French champion of champions award, given by L’Équipe, the national sports daily, to the country’s top female athlete.
“It was honestly a complete surprise,” she said. “I am in a bit in my golf bubble, and I would not have thought that a golfer would get more votes than all the great athletes in other sports.”
But the highlight of her year was overcoming her past struggles at the Evian, which she first played in 2014.
“I think it’s a very intimidating course the first time you play it because it’s very narrow,” she said. “The greens are extreme. I think it’s really a course that the more you play it, the better, and you start to understand with experience where you can be and really shouldn’t be. You get more comfortable even looking at it because the first times you play it is very intimidating visually.
“I also would say it’s not easy to handle because you are playing at home and there’s more expectation from people and a bit of extra pressure that you put on yourself and that others unconsciously put on you, too.”
So, what changed in 2023?
“It was honestly the first time when I played there that I truly didn’t worry about the result,” she said. “I just focused on the game itself and nothing else. And it worked.”
She will try to take the same approach this year as she takes on the challenges of Evian and the Olympics.
“Those really will be the biggest targets of my season,” she said.
Boutier took part in her first Olympics at the Tokyo Games in 2021, but that was not the full Olympic experience with the pandemic restrictions in place.
“It was a strange Olympics,” she said. “I hope and think this one in Paris will be much more typical, and it will be fun to be able to go watch other sports and have interactions with other athletes.”
These are the first Summer Olympics in Paris in 100 years, and golf made it back into the Games only in 2016. Her timing seems just right.
“It’s really an extremely rare opportunity, and I am fully aware of that, so I won’t be taking it lightly,” she said. “I feel fortunate that it is coming at this stage of my career. To be able to win a medal at home would be the ultimate dream for me.”
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