Europe won the Solheim Cup 15 to 13 on Sunday, and the number everyone reached for was Lottie Woad’s: a rookie, on debut, holing the putt that took it back. The more interesting number belongs to the captain.
Anna Nordqvist put Hull and Woad together in Friday’s foursomes. They lost 4&3 to Nelly Korda and Allisen Corpuz. She put them out again in the Friday fourballs and they halved. On Saturday morning she sent them out a third time and they lost 6&5, the heaviest defeat anyone suffered all week. That afternoon she sent them out a fourth time. They lost 1 up.
Half a point from four matches. To see how unusual that is, you need the rest of the history, so we built it.
What the record actually says
We reconstructed every Solheim Cup from 1996 to 2026 match by match, both teams: 256 team matches across sixteen editions. Then we counted how often any captain used the same two players together.
In thirty years, no pairing had ever been sent out four times. The ceiling was three, and captains reached it only twenty times in sixteen editions. Nordqvist broke that ceiling with the pairing that was performing worst, and she broke it a few hours after they had been beaten 6&5.
Every pairing used three times or more
Twenty pairings in the event’s history have been used three times or more. Here they are, best return first. The last row is the only one that was ever asked for a fourth.
| Pairing | Year | Team | MatchesM | PointsPts | Per matchAvg |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Carin Koch & Annika Sörenstam perfect | 2002 | Europe | 3 | 3 | 1.00 |
| Céline Boutier & Georgia Hall perfect | 2019 | Europe | 3 | 3 | 1.00 |
| Linn Grant & Maja Stark perfect | 2026 | Europe | 3 | 3 | 1.00 |
| Catriona Matthew & Janice Moodie | 2003 | Europe | 3 | 2½ | 0.83 |
| Cristie Kerr & Lexi Thompson | 2015 | USA | 3 | 2½ | 0.83 |
| Cristie Kerr & Lexi Thompson | 2017 | USA | 3 | 2½ | 0.83 |
| Charley Hull & Azahara Muñoz | 2019 | Europe | 3 | 2½ | 0.83 |
| Jennifer Kupcho & Lizette Salas | 2021 | USA | 3 | 2½ | 0.83 |
| Cristie Kerr & Kelli Kuehne | 2003 | USA | 3 | 2 | 0.67 |
| Paula Creamer & Austin Ernst | 2017 | USA | 3 | 2 | 0.67 |
| Austin Ernst & Danielle Kang | 2021 | USA | 3 | 2 | 0.67 |
| Leona Maguire & Mel Reid | 2021 | Europe | 3 | 1½ | 0.50 |
| Helen Alfredsson & Marie-Laure de Lorenzi | 1998 | Europe | 3 | 1 | 0.33 |
| Laura Davies & Ana Belén Martí | 2002 | Europe | 3 | 1 | 0.33 |
| Paula Creamer & Morgan Pressel | 2015 | USA | 3 | 1 | 0.33 |
| Stacy Lewis & Gerina Piller | 2017 | USA | 3 | 1 | 0.33 |
| Carlota Ciganda & Bronte Law | 2019 | Europe | 3 | 1 | 0.33 |
| Matilda Castrén & Anna Nordqvist | 2021 | Europe | 3 | 1 | 0.33 |
| Charley Hull & Emily Kristine Pedersen | 2021 | Europe | 3 | 1 | 0.33 |
| Charley Hull & Lottie Woad only pairing ever used four times | 2026 | Europe | 4 | ½ | 0.12 |
Points are for the pairing itself. Green is Europe, red is the United States.
The same captain, the same week
The row at the top of that table is also Nordqvist’s. Linn Grant and Maja Stark played three together and won all three, which only two European pairings had ever managed before: Carin Koch with Annika Sörenstam in 2002, and Céline Boutier with Georgia Hall in 2019.
So the best multi-use pairing in European Solheim Cup history and the worst in anybody’s came off the same team sheet, in the same three days, from the same captain. That is the thing worth sitting with, rather than the tidy version where the rookies won it.
And then it worked anyway
On Sunday, Nordqvist split them up, because in singles everyone is split up. Hull beat Megan Khang 3&2 for Europe’s first point of the day. Woad beat Auston Kim 2 and 1 on the seventeenth, which took Europe to 14 and made the 14½ they needed a certainty. The two players who had spent three days losing together won the two matches that settled it.
Whether that vindicates four sessions of loyalty or simply survived them is a question for Nordqvist. What the record shows is that no captain before her had been willing to find out.
How we did this. We rebuilt all sixteen Solheim Cups from 1996 to 2026 match by match from published results, both teams, and counted pairing usage directly. As a check, the dataset reproduces the Elias Sports Bureau figure of 43 instances of a player being used in all four team sessions since 1996. Where our count and a published one disagree, we have gone with ours and shown the working. Points shown are the points won by that pairing in those matches.