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 defence 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.
