Deep in the deciding set of a wildly fluctuating French Open final played in wildly fluctuating wind, Aryna Sabalenka inadvertently dropped her racket as she was about to serve.
On an afternoon when a trophy the Belarusian world No 1 coveted slipped through her fingers, it felt like a metaphor.
Two hours earlier, Coco Gauff had been little more than a bystander at her own execution. A devastating early onslaught from Sabalenka had propelled her to a 4-1, 40-0 first-set lead, and she looked poised to take a significant stride towards a career grand slam by adding a maiden Roland Garros title to her US and Australian Open victories.
Instead, in an echo of her win over Sabalenka at Flushing Meadows in 2023, Gauff rose from the canvas to mount an improbable comeback, hustling, chasing and counterpunching her way to a 6-7 (5-7), 6-2, 6-4 triumph and a second grand slam title. At 21, she becomes only the second American woman this century to triumph in Paris, following in the footsteps of Serena Williams, who was a year younger when she won the first of her three titles in 2002.
It was not a day for the aesthetes – the conditions saw to that – and Gauff later acknowledged the utilitarian nature of her performance. But winning ugly is still winning and, for a player once coached by Brad Gilbert, who famously authored a book on that very subject, the end more than justified the means.
While Sabalenka fretted and fussed about the wind and her own inconsistency, Gauff simply played her tennis when she could, and scrapped, scurried and made balls whenever her opponent’s sporadic periods of excellence did not allow her that luxury. It was enough.
“I’m just really happy with the fight that I managed,” said Gauff. “Today wasn’t pretty, but it got the job done and that’s all that matters.”
Just how deeply it mattered became clear after two hours and 38 minutes, when a final Sabalenka backhand flew wide, signalling the conclusion of a scrappy, emotionally fraught contest that swung back and forth as violently as the windblown flags above Court Philippe Chatrier. Gauff fell to the court on her back, her body convulsed with emotion, her mouth agape, before rising to embrace Sabalenka.
Making her way to the opposite end, she then sank to her knees on the clay, making a heart gesture as she looked up at her parents, Candi and Corey, before joining them in the stands. Perhaps the most touching moment came when her father, his eyes welling, tenderly wiped the clay from her clothes and face in preparation for the trophy ceremony.
There were tears too back on court, where Sabalenka cut a distraught figure as she sat in her chair trying to make sense of it all. For a fortnight, she had looked every inch the world’s best player. She cruised into the semi-finals without dropping a set, dispatching the Olympic champion Qinwen Zheng along the way, and then did what no one else has been able to do since 2021 by defeating Iga Swiatek, a four-time champion on the Parisian clay. But after her early dominance, she slowly began to implode.
If the 70 unforced errors with which Sabalenka finished the afternoon were alarming, even more so was the manner in which she unravelled mentally in the face of an obdurate opponent and a troublesome breeze that, as Gauff later explained, was hard to hit through from one end but mae the ball fly from the other. When Sabalenka won her first major title at the Australian Open in 2023, it seemed she had finally tamed her combustible nature. But she has now lost three of the six major finals she has contested, and here she reverted to old habits, her features all too often torn with anguish as she bellowed at her team and railed against the elements.
To her credit, she gathered herself sufficiently to make a fight of the decider, recovering from a break down to square proceedings at 3-3 and continuing to give everything even when another error-strewn service game put Gauff back in the driving seat. It made for a tense finale, but it was too little, too late.
Sabalenka ripped an audacious forehand return winner to save a first championship point, but was taken by surprise as Gauff attempted to convert a second, the wind holding up the American’s looped forehand as it looked to be sailing long. As the ball nosedived sharply on to the baseline, Sabalenka could only prod back a weak reply; her fate was sealed. If her frustration was understandable, particularly given that Gauff had been helped on her way by a mishit forehand earlier in the same game, her reluctance to give proper credit to her opponent was less so.
“Honestly, guys, this one hurts so much, especially after such a tough two weeks, playing great tennis, and in these terrible conditions, showing such terrible tennis in the final, that really hurts,” Sabalenka said after fighting back tears.
It was an honest admission of how she felt in the moment, but also a notable departure from the usual practice of congratulating the champion and her team first. Sabalenka went on to congratulate Gauff as the better player on the day, but later doubled down on her initial analysis, placing the blame for her defeat on the wind and her own poor play. She also emphasised the American’s good fortune.
“Conditions were terrible and she simply was better in these conditions than me,” said Sabalenka. “I think it was the worst final ever played.
“Honestly, sometimes it felt like she was hitting the ball from the frame and somehow, magically, the ball lands in the court and you’re kind of on the back foot. It felt like a joke, like someone from above was just staying there laughing and, you know, ‘Like, let’s see if you can handle this’ – and I couldn’t today.
“I think she won the match not because she played incredible, just because I made all of those mistakes.”
If it seemed a slightly churlish assessment, the 27-year-old’s portrayal of herself as her own worst enemy was accurate. It was Flushing Meadows 2023 all over again, with Sabalenka frequently on top in the baseline exchanges only to be undone by Gauff’s defensive resilience and her own inconsistency.
The ultimate outcome was barely imaginable after the first five games. Sabalenka set the tone with an emphatic opening service game that included a second serve ace, a pair of teasing drop shots and the same irresistible combination of depth and power off the ground that had toppled Swiatek.
But as the initial onslaught subsided and her errors became more frequent, the variety vanished from Sabalenka’s game. It flickered back to life briefly at the business end of the first set, the Belarusian reeling off four straight points from 3-5 down in the tiebreak with a blend of power and finesse. But by that point, Gauff had started to believe. Win or lose, she was ready to fight.
“After I lost the first set, I told myself, like, I’ll just give it my all and, you know, if I lose this match then at least I can say I gave it all out there, and I’ll go home and I’ll see my boyfriend,” said Gauff. “I’ve been telling myself that every day.
“Obviously I’d love to be here and I’d love to win, but sometimes you realise, you know, if you lose, whatever – well, not whatever, I hate losing – but you know what I mean, you go home and you reset.
“So today when I lost that first set I tried not to put too much pressure on the match and I think it worked – I was able to loosen up after that and play a little bit freer.”
As a double grand slam champion, Gauff can look to the future with a little more freedom too. From the moment she defeated Venus Williams at Wimbledon as a 15-year-old, she has lived with the pressure of suffocating expectation; six years on, she can rest secure in the knowledge that, even at this early stage in her career, that youthful promise has been fulfilled.