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The future has arrived
Cori Gauff announces herself at Wimbledon
But her ascent to the top is far from guaranteed
IT IS hard to avoid the impression that the tennis world has witnessed a changing of the guard. On July 1st , the opening day of the 2019 Championships at Wimbledon, Cori Gauff, a 15-year-old American prospect, upset the five-times champion Venus Williams in straight sets. Ms Williams, aged 39, was not the highest-ranked player to fall on the first day of the tournament; that honour belonged to the reigning US Open champion, Naomi Osaka, the second seed. But no first-round winner has garnered more attention than Ms Gauff, whose youth causes her to establish new records every time she steps on court.
She is so young that Ms Williams had collected her first two Wimbledon trophies before Ms Gauff was born. The teenager was the youngest ever to gain a place in the draw via qualifying, winning three matches without dropping a set in order to do so. Ranked only 313th among women players (to Ms Williams’ 44th), Ms Gauff is only the 8th woman this century to win a grand-slam match before her 16th birthday, and the youngest since Anna Kournikova carved her way through three rounds at the 1996 US Open.
Ms Kournikova, however, serves as a reminder that not all teenage sensations become superstars. Of the last seven women to win a grand-slam match at 15, none have advanced past the semi-final of a major tournament, or ascended above 7th in the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) rankings. (Two of them, 20-year-old Catherine Bellis and 17-year-old Marta Kostyuk, may still do so). Thus although Ms Gauff is unquestionably the best 15-year-old tennis player right now, years’ worth of obstacles lie in her path to greatness.
So far, she has held her own against much more experienced competition. On court, there is little to distinguish Ms Gauff from her elders. She stands 1.78m tall, and serves as powerfully as Ms Williams—herself one of the most effective servers in the game’s history. Her average first serve on July 1st was clocked at 107 miles per hour (172 km/h), slightly faster than her opponent’s deliveries. Her typical second serve proved more effective than Ms Williams’s comparably cautious offerings. She possesses strong groundstrokes on both the forehand and backside sides, cracking winners with 8% of her shots, in line with the tour average.
Although it is tougher to judge a player’s mental assets after a handful of professional matches, early signs suggest that Ms Gauff is unusually mature for her age. Her match against Ms Williams took place on the biggest stage of her career, against a legendary opponent. “I have never played on a court so big, but I had to remind myself that the lines on the court are the same size,” she later declared. Nevertheless, she seemed unperturbed by the sorts of hiccups that often derail young players.
In the final set, she had to overcome two particularly severe hiccups. After double-faulting on the fifth and sixth points of her first service game, she immediately bounced back, winning two points with a protracted rally and a strong first serve, to secure the game. In the eighth game of the set, she double-faulted twice more, surrendering a one-break advantage and falling to 4-4 in the second set. But again, she held her nerve and regained the break in the following game.
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