Tennis: is Coco Gauff “the one”?
Wimbledon has gone “loco for Coco”, said Oliver Brown in The Daily Telegraph. Just three months after her 15th birthday, Cori “Coco” Gauff made it to the fourth round of the competition – the youngest player to reach the last 16 since Jennifer Capriati in 1991. In the first two rounds – straightset wins over Venus Williams and Magdaléna Rybáriková – the American showed that she had “natural gifts in abundance”. But it was her astounding victory over Polona Hercog, in the third round, that “transformed her from prodigy to bona fide superstar”. After surviving two match points in the second set, she battled back, in a display of remarkable resilience. In the end, Gauff lost her fourth-round tie to Simona Halep, the former world No. 1, but she had already exceeded her wildest expectations. Few players in history “have made such an indelible impact on a Wimbledon debut”. Gauff isn’t just young by professional standards, said Nick Pitt in The Sunday Times. Even in Wimbledon’s junior competition, all but five of the 64 girls are older than her. But she has been tipped for greatness since she was 13, when she became the youngest player to reach the final of the US Open girls’ singles. Even so, no one thought Gauff would get this far quite so soon, said Simon Cambers in The Guardian. Her improvement over the past year has been extraordinary. Her thunderous serve now hits speeds of 117mph; her two-handed backhand is “a thing of beauty”; and she moves so quickly across the court that it “almost defies belief”. Her emergence over the past fortnight has “changed the whole landscape of the game”, said Simon Briggs in The Daily Telegraph. No woman has managed to dominate in the past two years, leaving tennis searching for a unifying champion. Now, Gauff is “looking more and more like the one”.