Jeeno Thitikul shot a bogey-free 64 at Royal Lytham & St Annes, the lowest round in AIG Women's Open history there, and leads by two after Round 1.
Jeeno Thitikul shot a bogey-free 64 in Thursday's opening round at Royal Lytham & St Annes, the lowest round in AIG Women's Open history at the venue, to take a two-shot outright lead into Friday's second round, according to results posted on aigwomensopen.com. The World No. 2 sits at -7 after one day, with the rest of the field still chasing the number she posted.
A bogey-free round at a links venue is a different achievement than a bogey-free round on a parkland course, and Royal Lytham & St Annes has a reputation for punishing the kind of small misses that a calmer course forgives. Pot bunkers, firm run-outs, and wind off the Lancashire coast all give a round more ways to go wrong than a single bad swing usually accounts for, which is why a clean card there means more than the number on the scorecard. Posting the lowest round the championship has ever seen at that specific venue means Thitikul played a version of the course nobody else has managed to solve on a Thursday at this event.
The two-shot cushion that round buys her matters more at a course like Lytham than it would somewhere more forgiving. Links conditions can shift fast between morning and afternoon tee times, and a round that holds up clean through changing wind is a stronger signal than the same score would be on a still day.
Royal Lytham & St Annes carries a long championship pedigree on the men's side as an Open Championship venue, which is part of why a record round there in this event registers beyond this week's leaderboard. A course with that kind of history has usually already been tested by decades of elite fields finding ways to make it hard; a bogey-free round against that backdrop is the kind of result that gets referenced the next time the championship returns to the venue, well after this year's leaderboard is forgotten.
A two-shot outright lead after one round leaves plenty of championship left to play, but it puts Thitikul in the position every player in the field wants and none of them currently have. As the World No. 2, she arrives with a ranking that already signals consistent, high-level form; Thursday's round adds a specific data point that backs that ranking up rather than just trading on it.
The chasing pack sits within range but not within comfort, two shots at a major is closeable across three remaining rounds, but a clean 64 on the round's toughest test also sets a bar the rest of the field now has to play against rather than just play their own game. Not every storyline from earlier in the week kept pace: Nelly Korda, grouped in Wednesday's marquee pairing as she chased a third major of the season, sits at +2 and tied for 53rd after Round 1, a reminder that a loaded tee time on paper doesn't guarantee a loaded leaderboard by Thursday evening.
The obvious question heading into Friday is whether a round that clean can hold up, or even repeat, once the rest of the field has had a full day to study how the course is playing. What makes this lead different from a typical Thursday cushion is what's attached to it: Thitikul is a nine-time LPGA Tour winner, most recently at May's Mizuho Americas Open, but she's never closed out a major title. Her best major finish is a runner-up at the 2025 Evian Championship, and her best result at this specific championship is a tie for 7th at Muirfield in 2022. A two-shot lead after Round 1 puts her closer to a first major than she's been in some time, and that gap between her regular-tour form and her major résumé is exactly what the rest of the week will test.
That context matters heading into a weekend where the pressure of protecting a lead replaces the pressure of chasing one, a different kind of test than the one Thursday's round already answered.
Round 2 tees off Friday, and the real test of Thursday's round isn't the number itself, it's whether a two-shot lead built on a links course's toughest day turns into a cushion or gets clawed back before the weekend even starts.
For the fuller picture of the field and the venue heading into the week, see our AIG Women's Open 2026 preview.
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