Kids, eh? It is five years since Coco Gauff had Wimbledon in the palm of her hand. She was 15 then, the youngest player to have reached the main draw in the open era, and Roger Federer’s management company was already on board. That bloke knows his stuff.
“The sky’s the limit,” Venus Williams said after losing to an opponent 24 years younger. “A star is born,” Martina Navratilova added. Old sage John McEnroe wondered if it was too much too soon, but gave in and also predicted she would be the world No1 by the age of 20.
He was wrong. Gauff is now 20 and only the world No2. She did win last year’s US Open at 19, but Emma Raducanu can beat that. Gauff, though, has grown up fast. At 16, she was delivering powerful addresses at Black Lives Matter rallies. These days her star status is now shown by the fact she gets asked the quirky-cum-inane questions that are the preserve of the A-list at press conferences. Hence, we know she has seen The Lion King stage show six times and no longer crochets in her spare time. When it comes to the actual tennis, her game is made for video montages.
After beating the gutsy British qualifier Sonay Kartal in the third round, one more win will make this her best Wimbledon yet, but she has been aiming much higher than that for years. After all, Gauff was only ten when she went to Nice for a trial and told the flamboyant French coach Patrick Mouratoglou that she intended to be the greatest of all time. He once told me that some of the prodigies cried when he tried to press them on whether they were living out some proxy parental dream.
“She looked me straight in the eye and didn’t look away,” he said. “She was offended when I asked her why she was going to be No1.”
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Gauff is a confident but generous figure. “She was playing really well in the first set,” Gauff said of Kartal. “It’s finding the balance of when to go for it and when not to.”
Expectations continue to grow, but she is getting used to that too. “If you lose it’s going to be a whole big thing, but at the same time your ranking is there for a reason.”
If Kartal sounds like someone from The Godfather, almost everybody on No1 Court expected the Londoner, 22, to be on the wrong end of the hits. Instead, the world No298 recovered from a torrid start and traded bellicose blows before the belief drained and she lost 6-4, 6-0. “I’m proud of my whole week,” Kartal said. “That first set was some of the best tennis I have played. I have never come up against someone like Coco before.”
Kartal had livened up another press conference this week by admitting that she and her coach goad each other to get tattoos if they reach certain rounds. “I think I will get a new one,” she said after her exit. It might be strawberries, she added. Either way, she has made her mark.
Initially, it looked like a day to forget. No doubt she had planned the opening game in her head, but reality bit with unseemly haste and she was broken to love. In no time, Gauff was in the groove, pounding down deep, hard and fast ground strokes. She won the first nine points. It verged on ugly. The crowd tried to rally Kartal, but that can be hard to hear when you know it is an aural sympathy vote.
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Then Gauff netted and Kartal began fighting her corner. Gauff looked frustrated that her greater ability was not providing the requisite results. The twin-pronged policy of hitting hard and harder looked flawed. Kartal found her bravery and broke back while the crowd savoured the blossoming scrap. Matches can sometimes pivot on small moments and fine margins, though, and a successful challenge by Gauff gave her a break point at 4-4. She capitalised on it. She won the set and roared. And that was all but that.
• Raducanu roars into fourth round with another straight-sets win
Gauff is now becoming the player the golden oldies always knew she would be. Asked about her memories of 2019, she said: “Just getting to Court No1 against Venus was a long walk. I was waiting for her quite a bit. I don’t know if that was her thing. This year I’m playing with a lot more confidence.”
She has already made the semi-finals at the Australian and French Opens this year, and is the No2 seed here. At 20 years old she is becoming a reliable force in the women’s game. And in the face of those old, bold ambitions, it is worth remembering that Serena Williams also had only one grand-slam singles title at the same age. This has been a week to celebrate sporting longevity via the feats of Andy Murray, Mark Cavendish et al, but age is only a number for the young guns too.
