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Coco Gauff lost her Round 3 match against Croatia’s Donna Vekić on Tuesday. While she took full responsibility for her disappointing early elimination, she called out the chair umpire Jaume Campistol and called for more video replay in tennis following an intense and tearful on-court argument near the end of the match.
Gauff was battling for her life in the second set after Vekić came back from 5-1 to win the first. She hadn’t been able to regain the calm strength she had displayed in the previous set, but what happened next sent her spiraling. She served the ball to Vekić, and the return landed on the baseline. The line judge called the ball out at first, so Gauff didn’t keep the ball in play. But the chair umpire disagreed and overruled the line judge, giving Vekić the point and a service break, making any comeback for Gauff even harder. Gauff walked over to Campistol and the pair argued for five minutes, with Gauff in tears, before the match resumed.
“I felt that he called it before I hit, and I don’t think the ref disagreed,” Gauff told the media following the match. “I think he just thought it didn’t affect my swing, which I felt like it did.”
Vekić was already ahead by several games when Gauff had the argument with the chair umpire. By that point, Gauff’s game had already fallen apart, and she admitted that she didn’t know whether the point going her way would have changed anything.
“I’m not going to sit here and say one point affected the result today,” Gauff said, “because I was already on the losing side of things.”
Whether she would have won or lost isn’t the point of her comments or her anger on the court. It’s about the rules of the sport being applied correctly to every player. And it’s not the first time she’s felt this way.
“It always happens here at the French Open to me. Every time,” Gauff said to Campistol during the argument. “This is like the fourth, fifth time it’s happened this year.”
There’s proof this has happened to her at least one other time in the past three months alone. At the French Open in May, pretty much the same exact situation unfolded when she was playing Iga Swiatek in the semifinals. She lost that match as well.
But all is not lost for Gauff at the 2024 Olympics. She’s out of singles, but she is playing mixed doubles with Taylor Fritz, who is also competing in men’s singles. Gauff is also continuing her longtime pairing with Jessica Pegula, who lost her second-round singles match earlier this week. Gauff and Pegula are seeded No. 1 in women’s doubles, and just recently won their first Grand Slam doubles title at the French Open.
Between her partnerships with Pegula and Fritz, it’s possible Gauff could leave the game with at least one gold. It may not be in singles, but gold is still gold, no matter the event.
