Coco Gauff walked off Arthur Ashe Stadium on Thursday night with eyes still wet and a clenched fist raised high. The world No 3 had lived through another serving ordeal, this time against Donna Vekić, yet she emerged intact – emotionally frayed but victorious – with a 7-6 (5), 6-2 win that lifted her into the third round of the US Open.
The match was less a straight-line triumph than a public unravelling and recovery, a window into the psychological toll of remaking her most important shot in real time. Gauff’s seven double faults in the first set recalled the low points of her title defense last year, when 19 doomed her campaign. At 5-4 down, broken by two consecutive missed serves, she slumped into her chair shaking, buried her face in a towel and cried.
“It feels human, I think,” she said later. “Being an athlete, people kind of disregard that side of us. People say, ‘You’re No 3 in the world, you should be better.’ But at the end of the day, if I didn’t pick up a racket tomorrow, I’ve had a career so many would dream of. Basically what you saw out there was what it was, and I was able to reset through it. It was a challenging moment for me on the court”.
Reset she did. When Vekić called a medical timeout late in the first set for treatment on her right shoulder, Gauff stayed on court, hitting practice serves to the same spot as music blared for a nearly full house inside the world’s largest tennis stadium. The scene resembled an open-air lesson in biomechanics more than a major championship. “It’s tough changing everything before such a big tournament,” Gauff said. “But I know for the future this is the right step forward, and this is the biggest test of them all. It will only get easier from here”.
The man responsible for the remodel, biomechanics coach Gavin MacMillan, has been at her side since shortly before the tournament. He previously worked with Aryna Sabalenka to rebuild her delivery and now finds himself in the glare of Gauff’s US Open. “He’s not a media guy,” Gauff said with a smile. “For me I just don’t want to let him down. He 100% knows what he’s doing”.
Despite her crisis, Gauff clawed her way into a tiebreak, where her superior athleticism from the baseline finally tipped the balance. When Vekić flung a forehand long to surrender the set, Gauff’s mother leapt from her seat behind MacMillan, shouting: “Come on! Let’s go!”
The release carried into the locker room between sets, where Gauff said that splashed water on her face and steadied her breathing. She returned looking composed. The second set told the story of a young player capable of compartmentalizing even as her serve betrays her. She hit just one double fault, held comfortably, and broke Vekić twice. The Croatian, who had beaten Gauff at last year’s Olympics en route to silver, faded under the strain of her arm trouble and her own rash of errors. Gauff closed the match with a crisp backhand winner on her second match point, this time sending a barbaric yawp skyward in celebration.
If there was a turning point, it may have come from the stands. Among those in the Ashe crowd was Simone Biles, fresh off her own golden redemption at the Paris Olympics. Gauff spotted her between points and drew strength from the sight. “She’s on my Mount Rushmore of athletes with Serena,” Gauff said. “Everything she went through mentally is something I follow closely. To see her there tonight gave me the reminder I needed … I was lucky to just come from talking to her, so I was able to tell her that in person.”
Simone Biles looks on during Thursday’s match between Coco Gauff and Donna Vekić. Photograph: Eduardo Muñoz/Reuters
The two-time major champion has not hidden how fraught this week feels. A three-set struggle with Ajla Tomljanović in round one had already tested her nerve. “This is one of the most nervous tournaments for me in general, and on top of all this, it’s a lot,” she said. “There’s been a lot on me this time, more than usual. But I think today I showed that I can get up after feeling the worst I’ve ever felt on the court”.
Even in acknowledging the pressure, Gauff leans on humor to survive. When an ESPN interviewer tried to brush off her comment that “at least my outfit looked good,” she doubled down. “Sometimes you have to be able to laugh at yourself,” she said with a grin. “Even after I lost at Wimbledon, I was like, well, it was a bad loss, but at least my outfit looked good, so it gave people something else to talk about. I’m not a fake positive person. If I’m positive, I mean it”.
There is still plenty to fix – most of all the serve, a project likely to extend beyond New York – but Gauff believes the ordeal is shaping her into something tougher. “This whole tournament will stick with me the rest of my career,” she said. “If I can get through two tough matches feeling how I’m feeling, I know I can get through pretty much anything.”
She next faces Magdalena Frech, the 28th seed from Poland. Whether her retooled motion can withstand another round of scrutiny will be the central question. For now, though, Gauff remains standing: shaken, tearful, but still very much in the fight.
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