Coco Gauff may be saving the best for last.
In what is shaping up to be potentially her best week of the season, Coco Gauff beat the world No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka in two turbulent sets Friday to set up a championship battle against the Olympic gold medalist Zheng Qinwen this weekend at the WTA Tour Finals.
The triumph came just a day after Gauff beat Iga Swiatek, who has held the top spot in the rankings for most of the past three years, also in straight sets, even though Swiatek had won 11 of their previous 12 meetings.
The breakthrough week is even more surprising considering Gauff fired her lead coach, Brad Gilbert, in September and said she planned to treat the final months of the season as an extended pre-season ahead of 2025.
So much for that. Gauff stormed to the title in Beijing and is now on the doorstep of winning the biggest purse in the sport, a $3.9 million payday provided she can beat Zheng, who may be the one player in the sport even hotter than she is.
Zheng recently made the finals in Wuhan and won a title in Japan the following week ahead of the Tour Finals. She beat Barbora Krejcikova, the Wimbledon champion, in straight sets Friday to qualify for the title match.
Gauff and Sabalenka came out firing, jumping at every chance to try to push each other back and hit through the court. They exchanged early breaks of serve early on, and then Sabalenka seemed to seize the advantage when she broke Gauff for a second time at 5-5 and served for the first set.
Gauff, staying cool in one of those tight moments that has rattled her for much of the season, broke back, then took advantage of some sloppy strokes from Sabalenka in the tiebreak, including an open-court miss on set point, to nudge ahead.
A back-and-forth second set followed, belying the ultimate final score of 6-3 to Gauff. There were four consecutive breaks of serve, but the first saw Gauff establish a 4-1 lead with a double break, giving her insurance in a chaotic final four games.
Ultimately, Gauff’s greater solidity from the back of the court made the difference, as it did in her round-robin match against world Swiatek. Gauff and Sabalenka both hit 13 winners Friday, but Gauff made 29 unforced errors to Sabalenka’s 45. Against Swiatek, Gauff lost the winner count 10-15 but hit 33 unforced errors to Swiatek’s 47.
Earlier in the day, Zheng took advantage of a tiring Krejcikova — who played in the evening slot Thursday — to advance 6-3, 7-5. Both Zheng and Gauff are making their debut in a Tour Finals final; Zheng on her debut, Gauff on her third appearance at the event.
Gauff is the youngest player to make a WTA Tour Finals final since Caroline Wozniacki in 2010. She likely would have predicted that for herself after enduring a tough summer in which her serve and forehand frequently let her down.
She split with Gilbert, with whom she won the 2023 U.S. Open, before hiring grip specialist Matt Daly to work alongside her longtime collaborator JC Faurel. She immediately won the China Open in Beijing, before losing out to Sabalenka in a tight three-set match in Wuhan despite hitting more than 20 double faults.
Win or lose Saturday, she will head into the off-season in a far better headspace than where she was in September after following up two semifinal appearances in Grand Slams with two fourth-round exits, losing twice to Emma Navarro, her teammate on the Olympic team who in both cases just had to stay steady and let Gauff beat herself.
Zheng has surged since her early exit at Wimbledon, winning a title in Palermo, Sicily before Olympic gold in Paris. She lost to Sabalenka in the quarterfinals of the U.S. Open and the Wuhan final then won the WTA 500 in Tokyo before arriving in Riyadh. She has a 31-5 record since Wimbledon, with three of those five defeats coming against Sabalenka.
Sabalenka’s defeat means she misses the opportunity to extend her lead over Swiatek at the top of the WTA rankings as the season draws to a close. Both women earned 400 points at the event, leaving Sabalenka on 9,416 and Swiatek on 8,370. Gauff and Zheng will play the final on Saturday, November 9, starting not before 7 p.m. in Riyadh / 11 a.m. EST.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Tennis, Women’s Tennis
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