Online Reporter
IF she only had the fortune of being born seven years earlier, Coco Gauff might have won Roland Garros three times already.
Gauff, now 21 years old, hasn’t lost before the quarter-final of the tournament since she was 16, a run of consistency many top players would kill for. Good luck hitting through her on the slow clay surface, she is blindingly fast.
She can rip her backhand down the line and offset her shaky forehand by loading the ball with topspin and fluttering it deep towards the opponent’s baseline. All this, on paper, makes for a modern clay-court great – or at the very least, the first American Roland Garros champion since (who else?) Serena Williams.
But Gauff is yet to win the title at Roland Garros, or receive much credit for her clay-court pedigree.
All thanks to the cosmically bad luck of sharing a generation with Iga Natalia Świątek.
Świątek has won Roland Garros four times in the past five years, starting at age 19, an alarmingly Nadalian pace.
Everybody else has suffered from her resolute gatekeeping, but nobody more so than Gauff. In the 2022 final, 2023 quarter-final, and 2024 semi-final, Gauff ran smack into Świątek, who dismissed her in straight sets each time. None of these sets have even been especially close.
It gets worse: Świątek is 23, close enough in age to Gauff that Gauff can’t count on her rival aging out of contention first.
Unless she can win Roland Garros – and she’ll probably have to beat Świątek to do it – Gauff is doomed to be perpetually underrated on clay. Setting the record straight might well be the ultimate challenge of her entire career.
As a cautionary tale for Gauff, the Roland Garros YouTube channel has spent the past few weeks uploading full replays of Rafael Nadal’s 14 finals at the tournament, many of them against Roger Federer.
To someone watching the dusty battles for the first time, they’re probably distinct, 2006 was the year Federer won the first set, he had a cataclysmic break point conversion rate in 2007, Nadal just flattened him in 2008.
But to the hardcore fan, and probably to Federer, those finals all blend together into the same match.
They’re athletically impressive and occasionally competitive, but never quite close.
Federer, one of the greatest players of all time, not only lost each time he played Nadal at Roland Garros, but never even looked like winning. – BBC.
