It was a difficult day for World No. 3 Coco Gauff, but the lesson from it is she can find a way to win.<\/p>\n
Battling an illness as well as being down a set and a break against No. 25 seed Sorana Cirstea in third-round action on Sunday, Gauff looked headed for an early exit from this year’s Mutua Madrid Open.<\/p>\n
But the American, a Madrid finalist one year ago, fought back to win 4-6, 7-5, 6-1 and advance to the fourth round, where she will meet No. 13 seed Linda Noskova.<\/p>\n
Cirstea starts stong and leads by a set and a break<\/p>\n
Cirstea, who had lost both of her previous career meetings against Gauff, got off to a quick start, breaking the American’s serve to take a 4-2 lead. Although Gauff fought back to level at 4-4, Cirstea earned a second break and served out the opening set 6-4.\u00a0In the second set, the Romanian, who is playing her final season on tour before retiring, broke early to move ahead 2-0.<\/p>\n
Guaff rallies for eighth three-set win in 2026<\/p>\n
But, as she has so many times before, Gauff battled back even after throwing up on court in the middle of the second set.\u00a0 The American recovered from a break down on three occasions before rallying to win the set 7-5.<\/p>\n
She went on to dominate the third set, winning the final five games to complete a 4-6, 7-5, 6-1 victory in 2 hours, 21 minutes and improve to 3-0 lifetime against Cirstea. All three of Gauff’s wins over Cirstea have come in three sets.<\/p>\n
It was Gauff’s eighth three-set match win of 2026. Only Jessica Pegula (10) and Magda Linette (nine) have won more WTA main-draw matches in three sets this year.<\/p>\n
“I don’t know how I got through that” – Gauff<\/p>\n
This is the third straight year, and fourth overall, that Gauff has reached the fourth round in Madrid.<\/p>\n
“I don’t know how I got through that,” Gauff told the media after her win. “I felt fine all this morning. I felt a little weird last night, but I was okay. Woke up this morning, felt fine. And mid-first set, I was feeling like I was going to throw up. And then I did.<\/p>\n
“They gave me some pills and that definitely helped. After that, once I felt the feeling of throwing up, then I just felt nauseous and tired. I just didn’t want to throw up in the middle of the point, which I almost did at one point.”<\/p>\n
Gauff added that she decided to continue playing even while feeling ill because she does not like to pull out in the middle of a match.<\/p>\n
“When I actually threw up on the court, that was like a little bit embarrassing. Then after that first game and the second, I was like that took everything out of me. I’m someone who doesn’t like to pull out (of matches). I don’t like to do that unless I really feel like I have no other options. So the plan was to always just try to finish, even if it ended up with me, just playing just to get through it,” she added.<\/p>\n
Gauff’s next opponent will be Noskova, who advanced by walkover as Liudmila Samsonova withdrew because of illness. Gauff holds a 2-0 career head-to-head edge over the Czech.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was a difficult day for World No. 3 Coco Gauff, but the lesson from it is she…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":629961,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[49,48,82,593,5452],"class_list":["post-629960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tennis","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sports","tag-tennis","tag-text"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=629960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629960\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/629961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=629960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=629960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=629960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}