The aspect from Coco Gauff's altogether impressive French Open final win that I find myself most impressed by is, oddly, something that didn't go her way. Gauff is now a two-time Grand Slam champion, and though are several parallels between her two upsets of Aryna Sabalenka, her most recent triumph was the more thorough of the two. Consider how things started for her on Saturday.
Gauff lost a heartbreaker of a first set to Sabalenka at Roland Garros, a 6–7 (5) odyssey that lasted longer than an hour and cost her a tremendous amount of effort to get back into, go ahead in, and eventually lose. Sabalenka raced out to a 4–1, 40–love lead in the set in the first 20 minutes, and the final seemed like it might go the way Gauff's first French Open final did, when she barely bothered to give Iga Swiatek anything to do in 2022. But Sabalenka faltered and allowed Gauff to break her serve and then hold, kicking off a gnarly run of five straight breaks that led into a tiebreak. Gauff finally got ahold of her serve and seized a 4–1 in that tiebreak before Sabalenka ripped it away from her.
Facing that level of disappointment, many players would wilt. The brutality of the tennis scoring system is such that the closer a set is, the more energy and good tennis will end up wasted, spent for nothing. But Gauff has a different relationship to pressure. Losing the first set in the way she did set the stage for her to take the match with relative ease, as it took far more out of Sabalenka, draining her of her confidence and focus. She'd won the set, but set herself up to lose the match, as Gauff emerged from the rugged encounter significantly stronger. Gauff won the next two sets in about as much time as it took her to lose the first. "I was able to loosen up after that and play a little bit freer," she said. That was all it took.
Not that it was easy. The final took place in pretty nasty conditions, with the wind forcing both players into a bunch of unforced errors. Sabalenka seemed to regard this as a personal slight, complaining to her coaches and the heavens when she'd shank a forehand or barely escape falling over to react to a late wobble of the ball's trajectory. She would wait to serve until she felt it was sufficiently calm, while Gauff was happy to trudge straight through the wind and keep fighting.
It's very easy to judge Sabalenka very harshly: Because she has the ability to blow almost anyone off the court, the thinking goes that any match she loses must be her fault. That was certainly the case in Queens in 2023, when she handed Gauff her first major title by melting down. Though even in that match, Sabalenka admitted she lost her nerve having to continually hit increasingly bombastic shots to overcome Gauff's impregnable defense. That dynamic held, to a certain degree, on Saturday, as Gauff sprinted for and retrieved dozens of would-be winners. "I think she won the match not because she played incredible," Sabalenka said. "Just because I made all of those mistakes from, if you look from the outside, kind of like from easy balls."
Gauff, yes, did not play incredible, but this was not a repeat of the 2023 U.S. Open final. Gauff played her typically stout defense, though it would be a misread of the dynamics of the game to think that Gauff was a passenger. The difference this time was that Gauff was defining points, rallies, and games with her own hitting, sending the propulsive backhand deep into the court and meeting any ball she had time to swing into with whatever power she could muster. Much has been made of Sabalenka's dropshot. She could bring Gauff to the net all she wanted, yet Gauff was better once she got there.
It's been an interesting year for Gauff. She crashed out of her U.S. Open defense in the fourth round to Emma Navarro after coughing up 19 double faults, falling prey in a big moment to a weakness that had crept up throughout the season. Gauff split with coach Brad Gilbert, changing up her serve motion and accepting that she'd have to be a bit more aggressive. After all, the Navarro loss showed that there was a bit of blueprint of for beating Gauff: Batter the forehand, wait for her serve to break down, and swing free, knowing that while she is hard to score against, she will also have a hard time scoring.
Gauff is not a perfect player, and her forehand is not the polished offensive weapon she wants it to be yet, but she's been on a strong run this season. She made the finals of both clay masters tournaments, surviving the occasional slog but more regularly delivering strong offensive performances. She lost those finals to Sabalenka and Jasmine Paolini; she also beat Swiatek 6–1, 6–1.
Her imperfections as a player magnify what makes her so special, which is, yes, the defense, but more than that, the stuff that makes the defense so effective. Her mental is ironclad. Where Sabalenka lost her nerve at having to hit into the wind—another way to say "having to deal with having some things out of her control"—Gauff embraced the unknown. When some players win, it can feel faintly preordained, as if their victory was divined and their tennis allowed to be unkinked for a few hours by something beyond them. What I like about watching Gauff in the biggest moments is that she dispenses with that fiction, and the lies it can allow a player to believe. She actually does believe she can win any match, and won't insulate herself in the comfort that something like Sabalenka's power is beyond her to control. She's a real competitor, someone we will all be lucky to keep watching for a very long time.
