Lucky loser Elisabetta Cocciaretto scored her third Top 10 win — and first outside a Grand Slam — with a 6-4, 6-2 upset of No. 4 seed Coco Gauff in the Qatar TotalEnergies Open second round. The Italian advances to the last 16 of a WTA 1000 event for the first time.

Doha: Scores | Draws | Order of play 

But despite posting one of the best results of her career, Cocciaretto admitted in her on-court interview that her attention isn’t wholly on the tennis this week. After all, the Milano Cortina Winter Olympic Games are currently being held in her home country.

“Well, I think this week is a little bit different for us in Italy,” she said. “Because now I’m more focused on the Winter Olympics than on the tournament, cheering for the Italian athletes. Maybe that was the key, that’s why I’m playing better. But jokes apart, playing more matches helps you to win more matches, for sure.”

Afterwards, Cocciaretto explained that she’d been glued to the downhill skiing races all week. Ahead of her first-round match against Elsa Jacquemot, she’d been cheering on her friend Sofia Goggia, who took the bronze medal in Sunday’s women’s event. Cocciaretto and Goggia had met through their mutual clothing sponsor, Emporio Armani.

“Now we are in contact,” she said. “We always send messages and FaceTime to talk about our sports and how you manage some things. She gives me a lot of advice.”

Cocciaretto has never skied herself — her parents forbade it as too dangerous when she was younger — but her coach Fausto Scolari hails from the Alpine town of Sondrio, and he’s taught her to appreciate the sport. Indeed, Cocciaretto calls downhill skiers her “idols”.

“I love how they approach the sport,” she said. “They have fear of nothing. They’re focused a lot and they put themselves after everything. If I have a child in the future, I will put him or her in skiing!”

Keys to the win: Cocciaretto was able to take that fearlessness into her match with Gauff. She said that in past years, she had put too many limits on herself — but now, she’s resolved to leave them behind.

“Sometimes I wasn’t sure about myself, about winning some matches,” she said. “I came on court, but not really sure that I will win that match. So I tried to not put that limit on myself, and go there and have maybe a mentality of a champion.”

With her game style of holding her baseline and taking the ball as early as possible, Cocciaretto signalled her aggressive intent throughout an opening set in which she fired 10 winners to Gauff’s four. The World No. 57 made her move at 2-2, standing inside the baseline on return and reeling off a series of superb groundstrokes to break.

Hot shot: Cocciaretto breaks Gauff with 33-shot lungbuster in Doha

Keeping her lead wasn’t straightforward, but Cocciaretto came up with resilient tennis in the clutch. Gauff pegged her back to 3-3, but Cocciaretto broke again courtesy of the best point of the match — a 33-stroke lungbuster in which both players ran each other ragged, before Cocciaretto was able to finally bust through the Gauff defenses with a backhand. She then saved a break point in each of her next service games, and converted her fourth set point with one of her most reliable weapons — the crosscourt backhand.

There was less tension in the second set. Cocciaretto broke immediately with another crosscourt backhand winner and cruised to the finishing line as Gauff’s unforced error tally rose to 39. The fifth game encapsulated the American’s woes. Having double faulted to go down 0-40, she played three of her best points of the match to get it back to deuce — only to concede it anyway with another double fault and a tame backhand into the net.

“I tried to be more aggressive, and I was hitting more unforced errors,” Gauff said. “I tried to be a little bit more passive, but playing with more shape, and she was just taking the ball early and crushing the ball. I don’t know. I think I need to figure out how to play against players like her who hit super flat and take everything pretty much early. I think the last two matches have shown that I’ve been struggling with that.”

Cocciaretto surging in 2026: Cocciaretto’s previous Top 10 wins had come over Petra Kvitova at Roland Garros 2023 and Jessica Pegula at Wimbledon 2025, but she had not won a set from Gauff in three previous professional meetings. However, she did have a junior win over the American to draw on, having defeated her 2-6, 6-2, 6-2 at the Australian Open in 2018.

She still remembers every detail of it, too — from her fellow Italians joking about her unlucky draw to the game plan she used to win.

“My tactics were playing in the centre and moving her, and it worked,” she said.

The result continues Cocciaretto’s stellar season so far — one in which she has used the qualifying rounds as a springboard to success. In January, she captured her second WTA Tour Driven by Mercedes-Benz title as a qualifier in Hobart. This week, she fell in the final round of qualifying to Varvara Gracheva, but entered the main draw as a lucky loser following McCartney Kessler’s withdrawal.

The 25-year-old will next face another American, Ann Li, with a maiden WTA 1000 quarterfinal at stake for both players.

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