Coco Gauff and Aryna Sabalenka's French Open final: A shared chase for each other's dreams

New York Times

a day ago

ROLAND GARROS, PARIS — Only in sports, and probably only in tennis, would a Black girl growing up in Florida and a White girl growing up 5,500 miles away in Minsk grow up to collide in Paris, chasing one another's dreams.
And here they are, Coco Gauff and Aryna Sabalenka, coming into Saturday's French Open final as the two best players in the world. Both are the hunter and the hunted. Both have a hammer lock on what the other one wants a piece of. And roughly two hours of tennis between the most aggressive force and the most premier counterweight in the women's game will serve as the next marker for whether either one can make any headway on their missions.
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'Too good' was how Gauff described the world No. 1 last month, after Sabalenka beat Gauff in straight sets to win the Madrid Open. She found similar praise Thursday evening, after booking her appointment with Sabalenka in a clinical, straight-sets defeat of Loïs Boisson. It ended the French wild card's fairytale ride through the draw.
'She's someone who has great big shots, and she's going to come out aggressive,' Gauff said of Sabalenka.
'I just have to expect that and do my best to counter that.'
Sabalenka used similar words with a different timbre when discussing the prospect of another tussle with Gauff, their first in a Grand Slam final since 2023, when Gauff got the better of her at the U.S. Open. Sabalenka led that match by a set and 15-40 on Gauff's serve, before the American — and 24,000 fans inside Arthur Ashe Stadium — put Sabalenka through the wringer.
'I have to work for that title, especially if it's going to be Coco,' Sabalenka said after ending Iga Świątek's three-year reign as the queen of Roland Garros Thursday afternoon.
'I'm ready to go out, and I'm ready to fight. And I'm ready to do everything it's going to take.'
Sabalenka has her reasons for that, beyond jumping at her first chance to win a Grand Slam win not on a hard court.
Gauff's mission may be more straightforward. Winning this tennis match and the French Open is an end in itself. Sabalenka is No. 1; Gauff would like to be there. Winning Saturday would be a start in closing the roughly 4,000-point gap between her and Sabalenka's perch at the top of the mountain.
Sabalenka has three Grand Slam titles to one for Gauff. Sabalenka has become a force of nature, landing in the final of six tournaments this year and winning half of them. That is a consistency and an efficiency that Gauff has only begun to approach for this year in the past two months, making the final at the Italian Open to go with the one in Madrid and the one she will play Sunday in Paris.
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Sabalenka's mission is more complicated, because a win could push her toward something less tangible: Gauff's level of stardom. In that arena, the gap between the players is as wide, if not wider, than the chasm atop the WTA rankings.
Understanding that requires understanding the alchemy that causes someone to become not only an all-time great tennis player, but also a star beyond the 2,800 square feet of the court court. It means capturing the love and adoration of fans of tennis and sports and popular culture, in ways that are often hard to explain.
Gauff accomplished that almost as soon as she beat Venus Williams on Centre Court at Wimbledon six summers ago, when she was 15. Life has been a series of billboards, magazine covers and walks on red carpets, including at the Oscars in March, ever since.
Being an American helps, but is hardly a guarantee. Being from Belarus, which has helped Russia and Vladimir Putin in its invasion of Ukraine, presents a serious obstacle. Sabalenka has been trying to overcome that — and the others that are far less concrete and explicable — for several years now, as she has scaled the rankings and worked her way into the hearts and minds of fans and non-fans alike.
It's the battle Novak Djokovic spent nearly his entire career fighting as he tried to gain the same level of adulation that Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal received. In some ways, he still fighting it now, as Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner try to make the sport their own and gather a new generation of eyeballs and suck up its oxygen.
Sabalenka let cameras follow her for an episode of the since-cancelled Netflix tennis series 'Break Point.' She regularly posts Tik Tok videos of herself dancing in stadium corridors and hotel rooms. She fired her long-term representatives at IMG, the sports and entertainment conglomerate, because, as two people briefed on Sabalenka's departure from the agency told The Athletic, Sabalenka grew frustrated with the disconnect between her standing in the sporting world and how potential deals were limited because of her nationality. The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their relationships in tennis.
'I was looking to build my brand, wanted a little bit more,' Sabalenka said at the Australian Open, shortly after she made the shift. According to Forbes, Sabalenka took home $9million (£7.2m) from endorsements in 2024. Świątek picked up $15m in the same period.
Gauff brought in $25m. She is, also according to Forbes, the highest-paid female athlete in the world. She recently fired her longtime agents, at Team8, to partner with IMG on Coco Gauff Enterprises, modeled on the kingdoms that Lebron James and Roger Federer have built.
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The intangibles of renown and the tangibles of racket, ball and court necessarily interact, fuzzing into one another in an athlete's mind. One of the challenges for Sabalenka and her coaches, Anton Dubrov and Jason Stacy, is focusing on the small things on the court, rather than big ones off it. They know what she is shooting for.
One of their mantras is 'don't fight it, don't feed it.' In a news conference on Friday, Dubrov said he will remind her that the trajectory of her career and her life is composed of all the steps she takes on the court.
'Try to use it as fuel for you so it motivates you to do better,' he explained.
Stacy said they talk about how these big thoughts will pass through her mind during the tournament and the biggest matches.
'You'll start thinking about, 'Oh, you're so close,' he said. 'Just continue to be consistent in the way we act and how we speak and our mannerisms' is their formula for surviving it.
Gauff has her own techniques for keeping things small, something she learned from losing her first Grand Slam final here three years ago. It crushed her in the moment. Then she went out in Paris the next day and found most people barely acknowledged her as they went about her business.
'Everybody is dealing with way bigger things,' she said after beating Boisson.
In their own ways, both players are telling themselves that this is just another tennis match. It happens to take place on the red clay of Roland Garros, a surface that wasn't supposed to be all that friendly to the girl from Florida and the girl from Minsk. Americans don't generally have a natural affinity for the patient, grinding style that clay generally imposes. But at 10, Gauff started training at Patrick Mouratoglou's academy in the south of France for long stretches. The higher, slower bounce on clay is very friendly to her forehand; it helps her use her speed and her endurance to run down more balls.
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Sabalenka has benefited from the patterns of the clay as well. That bounce and the extra time allows her to unload the most powerful forehand in the sport. Sure, it's harder to get the ball through the court, but she has shown her power can overcome it, at least against players without Gauff's athleticism.
She couldn't overcome her at the U.S. Open two years ago, when she was taking on Gauff and her 24,000-strong crew in Arthur Ashe Stadium. The atmosphere shouldn't be nearly that partisan on Saturday, though unless Gauff is playing an opponent on their home soil, she's usually got a big chunk of the crowd behind her.
As the underdog, she should have that on Saturday, even when that underdog status only explains part of what makes some players draw more hearts and minds than others.
Gauff said she remembers very little of her last Grand Slam final showdown with Sabalenka. She described it as an 'out of body experience.'
She has a vague memory of turning the match with a backhand cross-court passing shot in the second set. And she remembers running a lot. She also remembers somehow not being nervous.
'I woke up that day and I just felt like regardless of what was going to happen, I was going to come out with the win,' she said.
'You don't always get that feeling when you go on the court, but I did that day.'