Coco Gauff was trailing 6-3 4-1 on Wednesday when she turned to her box in Beijing and said out loud what the scoreboard had already implied. “I have no energy. I’m trying, I have no energy. I can’t see the ball, I feel like I’m going to pass out.”
Minutes later the world No. 4 was out of the China Open, beaten 6-3, 6-3 by Elise Mertens — a result that ended the Belgian’s run of five straight defeats against her and sent the No. 13 seed into the Beijing quarter-finals at the seventh attempt. Gauff, seeded third, hit 34 unforced errors, eight of them double faults. Mertens won 10 of the last 11 points on her serve and closed it with an ace.
Asked afterwards about the wave of racist messages she had received since her previous match, Gauff did not dress it up. “It has been kind of draining, I’m not going to lie,” she said. “I just turn off my phone and move on.”
A flickering board, a replayed point, and the aftermath
Two days earlier, Gauff had beaten 16-year-old Chinese wildcard Sun Xinran 7-5, 6-1 in the third round. Late in the first set, with Sun moving in to finish a rally, the electronic advertising boards ringing the court flickered. Gauff raised her hand and stopped play. After a video review, the chair umpire ordered the point replayed. Gauff won it, held for 5-5, and did not lose more than one game in a set thereafter.
The reaction online was immediate and ugly. “The amount of racist comments/dms I’ve received in the last few hours is insane,” Gauff wrote. “I’m not a cheater or a thief.” She followed it with a line that framed the distinction she was asking people to observe: “Hey everyone, you can dislike me or disagree about what happened without being racist.”
Her response to Sun was notably protective. “Xinran is an incredible talent and player,” Gauff said. “I apologised for the situation at the end of the match and she completely understood. I did not like to see her so emotional as I’ve been there and I really understand what it is like — but this is just the beginning of an incredible career.”
Not an isolated case, and tennis knows it
The pattern is documented, not anecdotal. The WTA and ITF launched Threat Matrix, run by Signify Group, in January 2024 to monitor abuse directed at players, and its first full-season report laid out the scale:
- 1.6 million posts and comments analysed across the 2024 season
- Around 8,000 verified as abusive, violent or threatening, sent from 4,200 accounts
- 458 players targeted, with 26% of all offensive content aimed at just five athletes
- 77% of abusive messages traced to accounts linked to sports betting
- 15 of the most severe cases referred to law enforcement
Gauff, a two-time Grand Slam champion and one of the sport’s most visible figures, sits squarely in the small group absorbing a disproportionate share of it. Sloane Stephens said she received more than 2,000 abusive messages after a single loss at the 2021 US Open. Katie Boulter has spoken about death threats and messages wishing harm on her family. The service now covers roughly 8,300 players on the WTA and ITF circuits, which is an admission of how routine the problem has become rather than evidence it has been solved.
A season that has run out of road
Gauff’s own assessment of the tennis was unsentimental. “I think I just didn’t play well. I think I wasn’t moving well,” she said. “I think today I was just a bit flat.” She also pushed back on treating the defeat purely as fallout: “It was an unfortunate situation but it is out of my control.”
The practical consequence arrived within hours. Gauff withdrew from next week’s Wuhan Open, where she was defending champion. “I’m disappointed to withdraw from Wuhan, especially as the defending champion,” she said. “I always love playing there. After a long year, my body needs some time to rest and recover.”
That removes a title defence and a significant block of ranking points from a schedule already deep into its eleventh month, and it reframes the rest of her autumn around recovery rather than accumulation — with the Billie Jean King Cup tie against Hungary in Delray Beach on 21-22 November still on her horizon.
Mertens, meanwhile, moves on to face Iga Swiatek, against whom she has never won in two attempts. For Gauff, the tennis question — flat movement, eight double faults, 34 errors — is fixable with rest. The other one is not hers to fix, and nothing about the past few days suggests the sport has yet found an answer that works at speed.
Sports journalist and editor at SportsPortal.net. Covers cricket, football, Formula 1, tennis, and basketball with a focus on how global sports connect with Pakistani audiences. Follows the PSL, Pakistan national cricket team, Premier League, and major international tournaments. Has reported on sports for digital audiences since 2021.
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