Reigning champion Korda hoping to bounce back at Olympics

Nelly Korda will start her Olympic women's golf title defence on Wednesday as the gold-medal favourite despite her brilliant season threatening to come off the rails in recent months.

The world number one arrives at Le Golf National hoping to arrest a sudden downturn in form after smashing records earlier in the year with a run of six wins in seven events.

Korda became the first LPGA Tour player to win six times in a single season since 2016 Olympic champion Park In-bee in 2013 with victory at the Americas Open in May.

The American had previously won five successive titles, including her second major triumph at the Chevron Championship.

But a disaster at the US Open, the lowlight a 10 on a par-three hole, was the first of three straight missed cuts and she could only finish tied-26th at the Evian Championship in July.

"The game of golf is a funny game," she told reporters on Monday.

"Sometimes you feel on top of the world and in a matter of a couple seconds, you just feel like you're on the bottom of the sea.

"So it definitely makes you appreciate the good golf that you play, but you have to have a mix of everything in there and everything can't always go well."

Korda edged out Japan's Mone Inami and Lydia Ko to win gold by one shot at the Tokyo Games three years ago.

She and sister Jessica followed in the footsteps of their mother, former Czech tennis player Regina Rajchrtova, in becoming Olympians.

Their father Petr Korda, the 1998 Australian Open tennis champion, never played in the Olympics.

Tennis-playing brother Sebastian opted not to compete in Paris and instead won the ATP title in Washington last weekend to reach a career-high ranking of world number 18.

"We always make fun of the boys because we say that the girls in the Korda family are the only ones that are the Olympians and the boys are not," Nelly Korda said. "So we have that above them in the family."

Korda will play alongside South Korean star Ko Jin-young and Chinese world number five Yin Ruoning in the first two rounds.