Defending champion Coco Gauff bounced from Roland Garros in another shock upset
By Kyle Feldscher, CNN
(CNN) — Defending champion Coco Gauff is out of Roland Garros after a stunning upset loss to Austria’s Anastasia Potapova in the third round.
Potapoval, seeded 28th in the tournament, took down the fourth-seeded Gauff 4-6, 7-6, 6-4.
It’s the worst result for Gauff at Roland Garros since her debut in 2020 and comes as she was trying to defend her victory in last year’s tournament.
However, she faded in the two-and-a-half-hour battle after battling back from a 5-2 deficit in the second set, eventually pulling within one game of winning the second set and taking the match. Instead, Potapova battled back to even things and then quickly romped in the tiebreaker, winning 7-1.
The third set was a seesaw affair, as Gauff earned a break point in the third game of the set and then won the fourth game to take a 3-1 lead. But then Potapova went on a run of her own, winning five of the next six games to take the match.
The win matches Potapova’s best Roland Garros, advancing to the fourth round for the first time since 2024. She has a chance now to advance further than she has in any of her six previous Roland Garros appearances.
For Gauff, it’s another disappointing performance in a grand slam tournament after winning in Paris in 2025.
She was knocked out in the opening round in Wimbledon and in the fourth round in the US Open. She made the quarterfinals in Melbourne at this year’s Australian Open, but was hoping for more in her return to the most famous clay court in the world.
Gauff’s loss continued a difficult day for American women on the clay in Paris. Earlier on Saturday, Diane Parry of France took down Wimbledon and US Open finalist Amanda Anisimova, wining 6-3, 4-6, 7-6 in a third set tiebreaker.
Gauff’s defeat is another shocking result at this year’s tournament, though most of them have so far come on the men’s side of the tournament.
World No. 1 Jannik Sinner was dumped out of the tournament on Thursday after enduring some problems with the heat in a sweltering Paris, coming within one game of winning his second round match against Juan Manuel Cerúndolo before cramping. He then struggled physically the rest of the match and ended up losing 18-20 games to go down in five sets.
On Friday, Novak Djokovic lost in a five-set epic against Joao Foncesca, a teenaged Brazilian who showed incredible fortitude in dealing the Serbian legend his earliest loss at Roland Garros since 2009. It was the first time in his career that Djokovic had lost to a teenager at a grand slam.
This is a breaking story and will be updated.
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