The Athletic has live coverage from Day 3 at Wimbledon 2025.
THE ALL ENGLAND CLUB, WIMBLEDON — Coco Gauff is out of Wimbledon in the first round for the second time in three years, after a straight-sets defeat to Dayana Yastremska of Ukraine on No. 1 Court.
Yastremska exposed Gauff’s weaknesses on grass in a 7-6(3), 6-1 win, aided by playing under the roof as dusk fell over south-west London. Yastremska skidded forehands and backhands across the slick surface, rushing Gauff’s forehand and pouncing on her second serves.
Gauff produced the defense and toughness that is her hallmark, pushing Yastremska as she got tight when well ahead in the first set. But she said ahead of the tournament that her serve was going to have to work as well it can for her to have any hopes of advancing, and it wasn’t good enough Tuesday evening. She double-faulted twice in the first-set tiebreak, when she had a chance to steal a set that she’d be behind in for most of the evening. She double-faulted nine times in all.
Yastremska, by contrast, was on fire most of the night. Her streakiness emerged only briefly in the first set, while the player that pushed Gauff to three sets at the Madrid Open hung around for almost the entire match.
She kept swinging hard, including on the final point, where she took a big crack at Gauff’s first serve and put it on her shoelaces at the back of the court. One roar from the Ukrainian later, Gauff’s Wimbledon was over.
While Gauff has never advanced past the fourth round in London, the tournament is the site of her breakout run in 2019. That has become an irony in the years that have followed, as she has struggled to figure out how to make her topspin forehand work with the low bounces and balls that stay below her knees. The effect is magnified when she plays someone like Yastremska, who can rush her and rock her onto her heels.
Still, Gauff is the world No. 2 and French Open champion. Regardless of the surface, she figured she would win at least a couple matches. But Yastremska, the world No. 42, was a tough draw from the jump. She made the semifinals of the Australian Open last year, and while she is an up-and-down player, when her game is on, she can be extremely dangerous.
Yastremska said in her news conference that when she saw that she would play Gauff, she thought “the match would be in her hands.”
She was an especially tough draw for a player whose time on the grass was shortened by winning the title at Roland Garros in Paris, and the media duties in New York that came with that. Gauff went to Berlin for a warm-up and lost in the first round. That was fine. She didn’t expect much. She could figure things out at Wimbledon, she thought.
Now she has 12 months to do that.
In a teary news conference a half hour after the end of the match, Gauff gave credit to Yastremska for playing as well as she did, while noting how the win in Paris and everything that followed snowballed into a 79-minute exit from the sport’s most important tournament.
“Mentally I was a little bit overwhelmed with everything that came afterwards, so I didn’t feel like I had enough time to celebrate and also get back into it,”Gauff said.
“But it’s the first time in this experience. I definitely learned a lot of what I would and would not do again.”
To get to that, Gauff will need to solve the puzzle of the quick turnaround from grinding out wins on clay, the surface that allows her to use her two biggest strengths, her lungs and her legs, more than any other, to grass, where only the aggressive players survive.
“I’m trying to be positive,” she said, admitting that she’d been struggling in the locker room as her team tried to make her feel good about her success of late, which would only help so much. “I just feel a little bit disappointed in how I showed up today. I feel like I could have been a little bit better in those tough tiebreak moments, especially after Roland Garros, where I felt like I learned a lot in those tiebreaks.”
The last time this happened, good things came of it. That was in 2023, when she lost in the first round to Sofia Kenin. Gauff retooled her team after that loss, bringing in Brad Gilbert, who helped her win her maiden Grand Slam at the U.S. Open two months later.
It would not be the last time Gauff would follow disappointment with a new start. Last year, after Emma Navarro eliminated her from the U.S. Open in the fourth round as she had done at Wimbledon, Gauff parted with Gilbert and brought in a little-known coach named Matt Daly to help retool her serve with an altered grip.
She also started trying to play less defensively, attacking with her forehand instead of backing up on it. Some of the best tennis of her career has followed, climaxing with the French Open title in June.
It’s unlikely that any upheaval will follow this loss. She knew what she was facing. Asked about her goals for the tournament on Saturday, she had dialed back any unrealistic expectations.
“I’ve lost in the fourth round a few times, so I would love to get past that stage,” she said. “I would love to win this, but I’m a big believer in just conquering one step at a time.”
What next for Gauff? Some preparation for the hard court season. Then perhaps the Citi Open in Washington, D.C. in late July. That’s where she landed two years ago after losing in the first round of Wimbledon. Then Canada and Cincinnati, and the event she has circled on her calendar more prominently than any other.
“I’m not going to dwell on this too long because I want to do well at US Open,” she said.
“Maybe losing here first round isn’t the worst thing in the world because I have time to reset.”
Still, it’s Wimbledon, the one where every tennis player, even those who struggle on the grass, dreams of excelling.
“I just want to do well at this tournament one of these years,” she said.
(Photo: Clive Brunskill / Getty Images)
