One year ago, Coco Gauff departed the Cincinnati Open with her career at a crossroads. On serve, she had capitulated, offering up countless double faults in most matches, and she had lost confidence in her progress and game. She believed she had to make drastic changes to her team before it was too late.
It has taken an enormous amount of resilience, patience and toil, but this week Gauff began to feel the consequences of those efforts as she closed out one of the smoothest tournaments of her career with her best performance of the season, thoroughly outplaying the third seed Jessica Pegula to win 6-2, 6-4 and clinch the Cincinnati Open title for the second time in her career.
This tournament marked Gauff’s fifth WTA 1000 semi-final of the season and her third final. Gauff has enjoyed a fairly consistent past five months on the tour but the 22-year-old had yet to finish any tournament this season without a defeat. Victory in Cincinnati marks her first title of the season and fourth career WTA 1000 title.
This win is particularly significant considering Gauff’s desperation a year ago. Gauff served 16 double faults and 62 unforced errors in her quarter-final loss to Jasmine Paolini at the Cincinnati Open in 2025. After a summer of dire service issues, that defeat prompted Gauff to take the drastic decision of hiring Gavin MacMillan, the biomechanics expert, to completely reshape her serve. She began the transformation at the most difficult moment last year, the week before the US Open, and the challenge of making such a significant change on the eve of her most important tournament of the year was only exacerbated by the massive scrutiny that accompanied it. During her second round match against Donna Vekic at the US Open last year, Gauff cried on the court.
There have been so many more challenges, and double faults, over the past year but Gauff has finally found confidence with her serve and it has had a transformative effect on her game. “I think it was a long journey, but I’m happy,” she said. “I’ve obviously got more years of tennis to play, but I think last year I was just frustrated with my game, and I felt like I was declining, and it’s not something any player wants to feel. You always want to feel like you’re getting better. So last year I was in a weird predicament, I made sudden decisions that most people probably wouldn’t do before a slam, but I think it’s worth it. And obviously, I feel like it’s night and day, the player I am from last year to now.”
After losing her first set of the tournament against Liudmila Samsonova, the fourth seeded Gauff rolled into the final having won the subsequent 10 sets during her time on the tour. Gauff has become well known for her tendency to fight through dramatic, tense three set tussles, so the ease with which she moved through the draw in Cincinnati was striking. “A lot of my supporters are like, ‘I can’t take these three set wins’ and my mom’s showing her heart rate going up and down,” said Gauff, laughing. “So hopefully I gave my team a little bit of a break this week. Can’t say the same for New York. It’s a grand slam, but I definitely was thinking about it. I was like, for the sake of my own mind and body, I was trying to get these done in two sets.”
Rather than desperately trying to manage her serve and minimise the amount of second serves she had to hit, Gauff now has the freedom to attack her serve. She played a spectacular match in the final, repeatedly cranking up her first serve above 120mph and she confidently forced herself inside the baseline whenever Pegula dropped the ball short. Her peerless defensive skills, meanwhile, drove Pegula crazy throughout. “It’s just so hard when you play somebody that moves… I mean, she’s the best mover on tour, I think by far,” Pegula said. “Just the way that she’s able to defend out of the corners is better than anybody else, and that’s truly her strength. So when she’s doing that and able to move forward and able to serve well and return well, it becomes very difficult.”
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Although Pegula’s tournament ended with a tough loss, she put together a spectacular run of her own, beating Sorana Cîrstea, Amanda Anisimova and then the defending champion Iga Swiatek in consecutive three set battles to reach the final, the latter being her best win of the year. As with Gauff and the Toronto champion Swiatek, Pegula heads to the US Open as one of the in-form players, where she will be desperate to turn her excellent results into a maiden grand slam title on home soil. As has been the case in the women’s game for much of the past few years, the competition for the title between the top players will be intense.
