She has hobbies that she occasionally takes up, including crocheting and French lessons. She said she might swing by London’s West End on Wednesday night to see a show.
When you have as much free time as Coco Gauff does these days, you have to do something to fill the hours.
Gauff, the No. 2 seed at Wimbledon, won her second-round match against Romanian qualifier Anca Todoni 6-2, 6-1 in 1 hour and 6 minutes on Wednesday, setting up a third-round clash with Britain’s Sonay Kartal that will undoubtedly draw plenty of attention at the All England Club.
The quick win continued a pattern this year for the 20-year-old American, a contrast to the early-round matches of last year’s Grand Slams. In 2023, Gauff has often struggled through tense two-set matches or gritted her teeth in three-set doozies. She needed to win four three-set matches to win the US Open title.
This year, Gauff played the first week of the Australian Open and French Open with ease, playing one match over three sets in the quarterfinals of each tournament before losing in the semifinals.
“I’m getting better at taking care of things, cleaning up and making sure these matches don’t go three sets,” Gauff said of her first-round success.
She attributed her newfound precision to increased confidence after her US Open win. Gauff captured the title in New York with what she herself called not her best tennis, giving her added conviction as she watched this year’s Grand Slam draws.
It also helped her feel comfortable playing her most aggressive tennis, which serves her well on Wimbledon’s grass courts, where the fast surface makes it harder to score points on defense.
“You basically want to be the first to strike,” Gauff said.
She dominated Todoni from start to finish, hitting the ball hard on serve and winning 85 percent of the points with her first serve.
“I’m just going to go for it more and accept the misses,” Gauff said. “Today I had a really low first-serve percentage in the first set, and maybe it got higher in the second.” She hit 38 percent of her first serves in the first set, 53 percent in the second.
The win keeps Gauff in good position to make a deep run in a fairly open women’s draw. Top seed Iga Swiatek is the favorite and will play unseeded Petra Martic of Croatia in the second round on Thursday, and 2022 Wimbledon champion Elena Rybakina remains a threat. She will play Germany’s Laura Siegemund in the second round on Thursday.
But third-seeded Aryna Sabalenka was forced to withdraw from the tournament on Tuesday with a shoulder injury, and later in the day, reigning champion Marketa Vondrousova became the first reigning champion to lose in the first round in 30 years. This is the seventh consecutive tournament that Wimbledon has crowned a different female winner.
Gauff noticed this when she looked at the championship wall at the Wimbledon training complex.
“It was a lot of different names, which is something new – not new, kind of new, after Serena [Williams]after a lot of legends,” Gauff said. “It just shows that there’s a lot of talent on the women’s tour and it’s everybody’s game. … My take, I mean, it gives you confidence, obviously, when you see the field is not full. I think it’s full in the sense that one player dominates or three players dominate. I think everybody has an equal chance, and it’s about who can perform the best that week.”
Naomi Osaka, the four-time Grand Slam champion who is seven months into her comeback after giving birth a year ago, was another big name to fall on Wednesday, losing to 19th-seeded American Emma Navarro, 6-4, 6-1, in a 59-minute sprint on Center Court.
Osaka looked rattled from the start, and Navarro was able to take advantage, winning 82 percent of the points with her first serve. The 23-year-old former NCAA champion at Virginia advanced to the third round in her second Wimbledon appearance with some gutsy tennis, keeping points short and playing a clean match — she committed just five unforced errors.
“She obviously has a really big serve, so I knew I was going to have to deal with that today,” Navarro said of Osaka. “I tried to change my position against the first serve. I don’t know — maybe that was in her head a little bit. I wanted to make her hit the serve she doesn’t want to hit, and I didn’t want her to know where I was going to be positionally.”
Navarro won 50 percent of the points with Osaka’s first serve in the second set to decide the match and send the former US Open and Australian Open winner home after her first Wimbledon appearance since 2019.