Coco Gauff will need fresh footwear for her next match. After two hours and 39 minutes of chasing balls around the Indian Wells hard court, she joked that her shoes were “pretty torn up”, some of them apparently left somewhere on court. The effort was worth it: the 2024 champion opened her WTA Finals campaign by getting past her compatriot Jessica Pegula in three sets, 6-4 in the first, 6-2 in the last, with a tiebreak lost in between.
The contest kept swinging. Gauff saved three break points at 4-4 in the first set and then broke to take it. Then the momentum flipped: Pegula pulled away to lead by four games in the second set. Gauff chipped away until she was the one in front at 6-5, one point from victory with Pegula serving. Pegula erased it and edged a tense tiebreak to force a decider.
That rescue act came at a price. Pegula said she had burned “a massive amount of energy” on the second set and had little left. Gauff broke in the very first game of the third, quickly led 3-0 and closed it out on her third match point with a loud roar. She credited her mental reset after the missed chance as the decisive factor.
The win was all the more striking because Gauff had not played since early October. She said she had never entered an event with so little preparation. At 22, she is the youngest player to reach five straight Finals since Martina Hingis, and it was her sixth victory over Pegula in 11 tour meetings.
Her next group opponent is Linda Noskova, the reigning Wimbledon champion, who needed only two sets against Marta Kostyuk earlier on Sunday. Kostyuk was a late replacement for world number one Elena Rybakina, who withdrew through illness, and meets Pegula next.
