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FLUSHING MEADOWS, N.Y. — Naomi Osaka is back.
In the first heavyweight matchup of this year’s U.S. Open, the two-time champion took out home favorite and world No. 3 Coco Gauff to record her most significant win since the 2021 Australian Open.
Osaka has longed for days like these since she returned to tennis at the start of the 2024 season, following the birth of her daughter. And on a warm afternoon on a packed Arthur Ashe Stadium, in front of 24,000 spectators and the watching world at home, she got the first of what could be many with a 6-3, 6-2 win. She hopes it’ll be just the start at this tournament too, as in the four previous times Osaka has reached the quarterfinals of a major, she has gone on to win it.
For Gauff, the defeat must have had an element of inevitability. She took the nuclear option of remodeling her creaky serve with biomechanics expert Gavin MacMillan on the eve of her biggest tournament of the year. She then exposed herself in the first couple of rounds with a shot that was still very much a work in progress but found enough to clamber over the line. She knew that this kind of process risked her being undercooked for the U.S. Open, but it was a step she felt she had to take.
“I don’t think I had enough time to make that adjustment,” Gauff reflected in her post-match interview.
But there were no regrets. Gauff couldn’t bear continuing to do the same things when she knew it was only leading to double faults after double faults and costing her matches. Short-term pain here would hopefully be for long-term gain.
All of this background has made this a challenging and exhausting tournament for Gauff. Her first-round match against Ajla Tomljanović felt like a form of exposure therapy, and the second round against Donna Vekić was like an anxiety dream playing out in real life. She wept on court against Vekić and later confirmed to Sky Sports that she had suffered a panic attack.
So she would have been forgiven for feeling nerves ahead of such a massive match against Osaka, a player who thrashed her on this court six years ago when she was still only 15. So much has changed since then, and she did not look overawed on Monday. Instead, she was outplayed, and a little exhausted from the psychodrama of the past two weeks.
“I maybe was a little bit empty,” Gauff said.
Osaka, by contrast, fizzed with energy and looked determined to enjoy this from the very start. She nodded and smiled to herself when the players were called from the tunnel, relishing playing in such a big Grand Slam match for the first time in almost five years.
“For me the main thing I want to take away from this tournament is just smiling and having fun,” Osaka said in her news conference. “I know in my first round I was too nervous to smile, and my (third-round) match against (Daria) Kasatkina was just really not smiley at all.
“Going into this match, I just wanted to be grateful.”
She started the match with that mindset, breaking Gauff immediately and holding serve to love. For the rest of the match, Osaka relentlessly targeted Gauff’s forehand and never erred from that strategy. It brought error after error and won point after point, and everything Gauff tried to break the pattern — heavy shots to Osaka’s backhand, hitting inside-in backhands from the middle of the court — did not do it often enough.
In the first set, Osaka put just 39 percent of her first serves into play, and yet dropped only two points on them in four games by constantly jamming Gauff with serves into her body. Gauff couldn’t find a solution to Osaka’s line of attack, and said afterwards that she felt “discombobulated” to for once be serving better than she was returning.
In rallies, Osaka’s tactic of targeting Gauff’s forehand was similarly effective.
It had almost worked for Tomljanović in the first round, but with less power, her tactic had been more attritional: to try and grind Gauff down and draw an error. That’s a tricky strategy to pull off against such a durable athlete and competitor. Osaka had the power to pummel away at it and force mistakes that way.
And while Gauff’s serve was much better than it was for stretches of her first- and second-round wins, it still let her down at the end of the first set. Two double faults serving down 5-3 gifted Osaka the opener.
The second set followed a similar pattern, with Osaka going after the Gauff forehand and drawing errors, while refusing to switch direction and let her opponent bring her athleticism into play. Osaka’s tactical single-mindedness meant that such a highly anticipated match never quite caught light, and she broke Gauff to lead 4-2 in the second set in another game which started with a double fault.
Gauff never really looked like mounting a comeback. Osaka duly won the next two games, with the match ending, appropriately enough, with a Gauff forehand error. After just 64 minutes, Osaka reannounced herself as a serious threat at the top of the women’s game. Gauff must believe that this short-term setback will be worth it in the long run. There is plenty of tennis left in her career.
Coco Gauff’s serve has been the story of the tournament, but it was her forehand that broke down against Naomi Osaka. (Angela Weiss / AFP via Getty Images)
There could be plenty left for Osaka this week. She faces the No. 11 seed Karolína Muchová next and said that her recent run to the Canadian Open final, the best result of her comeback, had been transformative. One win against Liudmila Samsonova from two match points down showed her that she could win tight matches after a run of close losses that intermittently spanned over a year. Another win against Elina Svitolina reminded her that she could hang with the world’s best from the baseline.
Bringing on Iga Świątek’s former coach Tomasz Wiktorowski for the hard-court season after parting with Patrick Mouratoglou has been another significant development. Osaka described Wiktorowski as being “really like a teddy bear” despite seeming “like such a tough guy” and said he’s focused on small tweaks rather than anything drastic. “It’s more like the little things that I might forget or just patterns or places to hit the ball that I’ve never thought of before,” she said.
Osaka, who was distraught after defeats in her previous two Grand Slams, laid bare her emotions on both occasions. Ahead of the 2025 season, she said that if results didn’t start to improve, she wouldn’t be “the type of player that would hang around.”
Monday, she said that she never actually got close to quitting, joking that “I don’t know if that means I like pain or something.” It wasn’t just for days like this that she kept going. It was more simple and existential.
Describing her need to keep playing tennis, she said: “I tell people it’s like breathing air to me.”
How Osaka beat Gauff
Osaka won the first set mostly by staying steady and accepting a lot of charity from Gauff, especially on her second serve, where Osaka won 9 of 11 points.
Usually, players are happy if they can win half of the points on their second serve. However, Osaka had a clear plan: to send most of those second serves right at Gauff’s body, preventing her from taking a clean cut. It worked to near perfection, which was a good thing for Osaka, who struggled with her first serve, as she was only able to put half of them into the box.
Osaka’s second serve wasn’t particularly dangerous. It averaged about 80 mph, ripe for a feast from someone whose forehand is in decent form.
Gauff’s isn’t, which is why she is in the process of restructuring it with Gavin MacMillan, a highly regarded biomechanist who helped Aryna Sabalenka get to world No. 1 by transforming her serve. He is doing that for Gauff, too, but it was her forehand that broke down on Arthur Ashe Stadium.
Osaka and all of Gauff’s other opponents walk onto the court with just one idea: make Gauff prove that she can hit that shot over and over again. Often, she can’t, and Monday was no exception. Gauff made 20 unforced errors on her forehand compared with eight from her backhand, and four more forced ones.
Of course, Osaka had to do plenty more than dump in serves and wait for errors. She has dedicated much of her time over the past two years, since her return from maternity leave, to adjusting to a style of tennis that is increasingly reliant on movement for success. During the three years when Osaka was at her peak, from 2018 to 2021, players had more opportunities to stand in the center of the court and swing away. Power reigned.
That is far less true now, with the best players, Gauff chief among them, able to get in and out of the corners, slide across the baseline and chase down drop shots, turning defense into offense from anywhere.
Osaka did that repeatedly on Monday, stretching to extend points then hustling back to the center of the court for the next shot. She knew that the more balls she put in play, the better the chances of inducing an error from Gauff. She didn’t have to hit the lines; she just had to hit the ball with pace and keep it inside them.
If she could do that, given Gauff’s confidence these days and the state of her main strokes, the likelihood was that Gauff’s errors would overwhelm her. There are days when players try this, and Gauff finds her rhythm or turns the match physical, using her legs and her lungs to prevail. There are days when she breaks the pattern, lifting her forehand inside-out and scampering down every ball.
Monday wasn’t one of them. Osaka’s pace and consistency were enough. — Matt Futterman, senior tennis writer
(Top photo: Sarah Stier / Getty Images)