Coco Gauff has described the racist abuse she received on social media as draining, days after a disputed replayed point at the China Open triggered a backlash that went far beyond disagreement about a tennis decision.
The American, ranked fourth in the world, beat Chinese teenager Sun Xinran in the third round after stopping a rally late in the first set because electronic advertising boards beside the court flickered as Sun appeared ready to hit a winning shot. After a video review, the chair umpire ordered the point to be replayed. Gauff won the replayed point, levelled the set and went on to win the match.
Players are allowed to seek review of certain judgement calls, including whether a distraction interfered with play. Gauff said she apologised to Sun after the match and that the 16-year-old understood the situation. Online, however, criticism turned abusive. Gauff posted that people could dislike her or disagree with what happened without being racist, and said the volume of racist comments and direct messages was extreme.
The episode followed her into the next round. Gauff lost to Elise Mertens, a player she had beaten in all five of their previous meetings, by 6-3, 6-3. Reports said she committed far more unforced errors and double faults than her opponent and told her team during the second set that she had no energy. Afterwards she acknowledged that the abuse had been draining and that she had turned off her phone.
Later the same day, the Wuhan Open announced that Gauff, its defending champion, had withdrawn from the tournament. In a statement carried by reports, she said that after a long year her body needed rest and recovery. The withdrawal should not be attributed solely to the abuse; the reports link the decision to rest after a long season. The sequence nevertheless shows the burden elite players carry when a sporting dispute becomes a social-media storm.
The women’s tour has invested in systems to monitor abuse. Reports cited tour research counting more than 12,000 abusive posts and messages directed at players and officials in 2025, up from the year before. Monitoring can remove content and identify accounts, but it cannot stop a player from seeing the first wave.
Former champions Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova publicly defended Gauff. Their support mattered because it shifted the conversation from whether the umpire was right to how a young athlete was treated for using an available review.
Gauff’s tennis will be judged again soon enough. The lasting question from Beijing is institutional: how tours, tournaments and platforms protect players when a single replayed point can produce thousands of abusive messages before the next match begins.
Gauff’s experience is part of a documented rise in online abuse aimed at tennis players, much of it linked to gambling and to viral clips stripped of context. A replayed point becomes, within hours, a character accusation against a 22-year-old who followed the review rules available to both players. The tour’s monitoring systems and the public support of former champions help, but they operate after the messages have been sent. Tournaments may face growing pressure to act faster on the accounts they can identify and to shield players from press-conference questions that repeat the abuse back to them. Gauff turned her phone off. The sport cannot.
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