Coco Gauff's French Open title and a journey into the tennis unknown

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5 hours ago

ROLAND GARROS, PARIS — When it happens twice, it's not an accident. Coco Gauff is on her way.
Nearly two years after her breakthrough win at the 2023 U.S. Open, Gauff staged a stirring comeback against the world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka at the French Open, to capture her second Grand Slam title 6-7(5), 6-2, 6-4.
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After two hours and 38 minutes of tense and tight, often messy but occasionally breathtaking tennis from one of the great athletes on the planet, Gauff watched one last Sabalenka ball fly off the court. She collapsed on the clay and rolled over face-first in the red dirt.
She cupped her mouth with her hand in disbelief. She looked up at her parents, her father pumping his fist in the air; her mother jumping for joy.
There was a hug for Sabalenka, who had made her way around to Gauff's side of the net, and another for Spike Lee, the film director seated in the front row, one of dozens of celebrities who had come to Paris for this, because that's what happens when Gauff plays in a match of this magnitude.
And then came the joyous stroll up into the stands to find her parents and the rest of the crew. To find the people who had lifted her out of the dark moments last year, when she had to confront the fact that what happened on a September night in New York might never happen again.
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Gauff's win was for everyone who has ever looked in the mirror and felt that they are going backwards, not forwards; that what carried them to some early success isn't working anymore; that playing a long game, falling behind in the beginning, can make all the difference to coming out ahead.
It was also a win for everyone who has ever fought hard to keep their cool when things aren't going their way, when mistakes are coming hard and fast, when the conditions attached to a dream aren't the ones they wanted. That's what Gauff did on a windy and wild day in Paris, as Sabalenka did the opposite. The world No. 1 came unglued, screaming at her coaches. Then she announced to the world Gauff had not won because she had played well, but because Sabalenka had played terribly.
All of this has been nearly a year in the making and anything but guaranteed. Change, especially the kind Gauff needed, carries plenty of risk. But the bigger risk lay in not trying something new, even if trying something new involved entirely remaking the two most important shots in tennis while trying to stay at the top of the sport.
Last September, just under a year on from her first great triumph, Gauff sat in a media room after hitting 19 double faults and missing countless forehands in a fourth-round defeat to Emma Navarro. The rest of the WTA Tour knew then that if they just stayed with her, put pressure on her serve and attacked her forehand, at some point, the house of cards would collapse.
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'I don't want to lose matches like this anymore,' she said.
Nine months later, through some long stretches of doubt, she has a second Grand Slam trophy for her parents to store at home in Florida.
'I didn't think I could do it,' she said from the center of Court Philippe-Chatrier during the trophy ceremony.
In her hotel room Friday night, trying to make herself believe, she wrote down over and over: 'I will be the French Open champion 2025.' Gabby Thomas, the Olympic 200-meter sprint gold medalist, had done her version of this for the Paris Games last summer.
'I was just looking at myself in the mirror and I was telling myself, trying to put it in my brain, so I had that belief,' Gauff said.
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How she did that involves the rarest of innate athletic ability, but also some even rarer qualities in a person as young as Gauff. An honesty about who she is as a tennis player and a person. The drive to see how good she might really be, even if she has already earned enough money and fame to live without ever enduring another weight or track session in her life.
Even before winning the 2023 U.S. Open, Gauff was so much more than a tennis player. She is an avatar for a certain type of worldly, TikTok-savvy, Gen-Z female strength. The first Grand Slam boosted her stature tenfold, landing her on the cover of Vogue and the red carpet at the Oscars. She is the world's highest-paid female athlete.
That's not what Gauff is in this for. So she plunged headlong into the unknown.
Out went the big-name coach, Brad Gilbert, who had helped her to that maiden Grand Slam title in 2023. In came a virtual unknown named Matt Daly, who, along with her longtime coach Jean-Christophe Faurel, convinced her that she was capable of big things once again — if she embraced change.
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How radical? How about changing the way she holds her racket when she serves, even if she's been doing it one way for a decade? How about leaning in on her forehand and seizing the initiative, instead of leaning back and resorting to defense too often. A metaphor if ever there was one, because this has always been about more than tennis for Gauff, a Black American athlete trying, in her words, 'to use her racket to change the world.'
'There's a lot going on in our country right now,' Gauff said in her post-match news conference, the shiny silver trophy beside her. She was here to represent people who look like her, 'who maybe don't feel as supported during this period, and so just being that reflection of hope and light.'
Last fall, at the start of all those changes, it looked like getting an opportunity to do that might take a while. Four months, maybe six. Maybe more.
But, eventually, the serve was going to be more assured and she was going to be able to boss her way around the court as she never had against the best players in the world, being the aggressor rather than the counterpuncher, if that was what the moment required.
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Very quickly, Gauff was all in. She doesn't do much halfway, and she didn't on Saturday, on the court or off it, even if this was a match in which she had to inhabit the role of supporting actor in the face of Sabalenka's desire to play first-strike from the off.
She had won a Grand Slam already, but she said this one was harder. In between, she had had five more shots at a second, and the closest she had come were two semifinals. She didn't want to be a one-hit wonder, and she really wanted this title. With her speed, endurance and willingness to fight the wars of attrition that red clay can require, she had heard for years that this tournament offered her one of her best shots at a major.
'I felt like if I went through my career and didn't get at least one of these, I would feel regrets,' she said.
She'd already had plenty of those. Before facing Iga Świątek in the 2022 French Open final, she cried, because she was so nervous. She struggled to breathe. She knew she'd lost before she'd even hit the first ball. Świątek rolled her over and continued to dominate this tournament as few have done — until this year, when Sabalenka, under the roof, proved one set too many.
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On Saturday, Gauff said she felt ready to leave her heart and her lungs on the court, and regardless of the result, she could leave proud.
Gauff fell behind early in the first set but clawed her way back as Sabalenka's errors mounted, and she grew more confident that she could put the ball past her when she needed to. She also began to weather Sabalenka's blistering returns, watching more and more of them pound into the net. She started reading the drop shots and legging out the net battles.
Still, she ended up on the short end of a 77-minute first set when Sabalenka grabbed the last three points of a tiebreak. That would be as good as it got for Sabalenka. Gauff sat on her chair and told herself to take the pressure off the match. Losing would not be the end of the world. She hates losing, but it happens. She'd go home, she'd see her boyfriend, she'd reset.
'I was able to loosen up after that and play a little bit freer,' she said.
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In weathering the Sabalenka storm but losing the set, she had also forced her opponent to confront her own discomfort. A 6-1 or 6-2 blowout and Sabalenka, who was less able to deal with the intangibles of wind and weather than Gauff, would have been relaxed. The grind she got pulled into sent her into a spiral from which she could not recover.
Gauff embraced Sabalenka's descent from a first-strike machine with a lethal drop shot into a player swinging from side to side, trying anything to keep Gauff off balance but, in doing so, sending the American into the side-to-side defense dance that she can do better and longer than anyone in the world. Gauff applied just enough pressure to let the wind and Sabalenka's brain do the work.
When it was over, Sabalenka's mind was still a jumble, claiming that some supernatural force had sent ball after ball off the frame of Gauff's racket into the corners of the court, 'like somebody from above was just staying there laughing, like: 'Let's see if you can handle this.''
The person asking her if she could handle this was actually on the other side of the net.
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Gauff knew it had been a decade since her inspiration, Serena Williams — or any other American — had won this title. Williams helped her dream that she could one day do it.
With 15,000 people in the stadium chanting her name as the win grew closer, she had her chance to do that for someone else, 'to represent the Americans who look like me and people who support the things that I support.'
Nine months after the start of her journey into the unknown, she found out what it was all for. Deep down, she had always known.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Tennis, Women's Tennis
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