Coco Gauff claims WTA Finals — Quotes from Riyadh and more
By Joey Dillon
The IX: Tennis Tuesday with Joey Dillon, Nov. 12, 2024
Howdy, y’all, Happy Tennis Tuesday! The 2024 WTA season has come to a close after the first edition of the WTA Finals Riyadh took place. After eight days of play, two champions emerged — two I admit I didn’t have on my radar taking home the hardware. How the finals would do in Saudi Arabia was a question mark and while the crowds were a bit subpar, the event itself seemed to be well-liked by the tour.
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In singles, Coco Gauff earned the largest paycheck in women’s tennis history — $4.8 million — for her four wins in the Finals. She bested Jessica Pegula and Iga Swiatek in straight sets before falling to Barbora Krejcikova in her final round robin match. In the semifinals, she upset Aryna Sabalenka in two sets before winning a titanic battle against Zheng Qinwen. Zheng opened her campaign with a loss to Sabalenka before earning a three-setter over Elena Rybakina and destroying Jasmine Paolini in a winner-take-all final round robin. In the semifinals, the Olympic gold medalist defeated Krejcikova to continue her stellar Fall campaign.
Now, back to the championship match. Down a set and 2-0 (and 3-1), Gauff roared back to take the second set before a topsy-turvy third set would determine the champion. Zheng went up a break before Gauff would take three in a row before the Chinese replied with the same. Though up 5-3, Zheng never reached championship point, though Gauff was extremely lucky with a netcord winner at 5-3 30-30 that would’ve resulted in a match point. The two would end up playing a tiebreaker for the title and Gauff would go up 6-0 before capturing the largest WTA-level title with a 3-6,6-4,7-6(2) win in three hours.
I always wonder, when a new WTA Finals champion emerges, how will her next season unfold. Still, this win can really catapult Gauff into unchartered territory in 2025. She’s been slowly working on her serve and forehand with new coach Matt Daly and with a solid offseason, could have that under control. Her win over Swiatek was a massive mental hurdle to overcome and little personal victories add up. Tie in the win over Sabalenka and you could be a fool for perhaps not betting that the American could claim the No. 1 singles ranking at some point next year.
In doubles, Gaby Dabrowski and Erin Routliffe won their first WTA Finals trophy, taking out Katerina Siniakova and Taylor Townsend. Both teams went 3-0 in the respective round robin groups, though they each needed match tiebreakers in two of those matches. In the semifinals, Dabrowski/Routliffe, the No. 2 seeds, knocked out the longtime duo of Nicole Melichar-Martinez and Ellen Perez in the later pair’s final match as a duo. No. 8 Townsend/Siniakova also won a two-setter, this time over Veronika Kudermetova and Chan Hao-Ching. In the final, it was a dazzling display of tennis from Dabrowski/Routliffe, with Routliffe perhaps taking MVP honors of the match. I anticipate them staying together as a duo in 2025, but the big question mark is on Siniakova. The Czech originally started out the season with Storm Sanders, who then went out with an Achilles tear, before basically winning with whichever partner she decided to have that week. Due to Sanders’ comeback (but also she and Townsend continuing to gel really well), my gut says they’ll continue partnering up next year too.
This Week in Women’s Tennis
I will also add in my two cents about the controversy surrounding Jon Wertheim’s comments caught on a hot mic about Barbora Krejcikova. In a Notes app apology, Wertheim explained his side and took full ownership, with Tennis Channel suspending him as a commentator indefinitely. Considering there’s two more weeks of the season, it likely will blow over by the Australian summer. Krejcikova and the WTA also gave their own statements, but I don’t like the tour picking and choosing when to comment on commentators’ blunders. Not only were the quiet when Nick Kyrgios said misogynistic comments about players, but the repeated transphobic rhetoric Martina Navratilova spews and endorses on social media. They should hold everyone accountable, not picking and choosing to go around their “Legend.”
At the WTA 125 level, Rebecca Marino won the biggest title of her career, taking out Alycia Parks to win the Dow Tennis Classic in Midland, Michigan. In doubles, Emily Appleton and Maia Lumsden defeated Ariana Arseneault and Mia Kupres. At the Cali Open in Colombia, Irina-Camelia Begu downed Veronika Erjavec in the final, while Erjavec and Kristina Mladenovic won the doubles crown with a win over Tara Wurth and Katarina Zavatska.
Aryna Sabalenka and Katerina Siniakova were honored for finishing atop the year-end rankings ranked No. 1 in singles and doubles, respectively.
Whether it be a trial for just one tournament to full-time duties, coaching changes have helped many at the WTA Finals.
The first-ever fall NCAA Tennis Championships have their fields with the final events completing this past weekend. The brackets will be revealed on November 16 with play starting in Waco, Texas, on November 19. John Parsons has a solid breakdown of the overall field (click for the multi-tweet thread):
Be sure to check out WTA Insider’s Champion’s Corners with both Coco Gauff and Gabriela Dabrowski/Erin Routliffe.
Today is the first day you can access Tennis Channel’s main feed without a cable subscription as the station has unrolled a direct-to-consumer streaming option.
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Until the end of November, every new subscriber (and subscription renewal) to The Next will be entered to win a Panini trading card celebrating the WNBA champion New York Liberty. And maybe, just maybe, it will be the highly coveted Ellie rookie card!
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Quotes: WTA Finals Riyadh Media Day
Q. As CEO of the WTA, are you at all concerned about the optics bringing the WTA Finals to a country that ranks 126 out of 146 in the global gender gap index?
PORTIA ARCHER: Thank you.
I understand that there are certain different views and tensions around that question – ‘the optics’, as you described.
I think what we’ve done at the WTA through our process of deciding to come here was to keep in mind the goals and objectives that Marina laid out for the WTA. I think it helps us achieve those goals and objectives.
Our decision was made with full consultation with our players and with our tournaments. I think that that led to the decision to come here and being comfortable with it.
We as the WTA are a global sport, a global association. We play tournaments all around the world. We have players from nearly 90 different countries or nations. We often play in environments and in countries that have different customs, different cultures, and in some cases different value systems than I might have personally or that the WTA may have as an organization based in the United States, for example. We take care to respect those local customs. We may not always agree with some of the policies in place in a particular country.
We feel comfortable in our decision and we think that it will support women in tennis and enable some very positive things to come out of us being here that will last well beyond the eight days that we’re here this year and successively the next two years when we host the tournament here.
Q. You mentioned the WTA doesn’t need to be aligned necessarily with the values of the country you’re in. Is there a sort of limit to that or does that mean you would go anywhere as long as you felt it was the right thing for the players and the tour in general?
PORTIA ARCHER: Yeah, maybe I misspoke. My intention was to really say that we respect the values, even if they differ from other countries that we find ourselves in and compete in.
I don’t know ‘limitations’. It’s difficult for me to say where we would draw the line, so to speak. I do know we take great care to think about these decisions as to where we go. We take care to have a thorough process that includes all of the stakeholders involved.
We do weigh what tradeoffs there are. We do try to stay in alignment with the WTA values. I wouldn’t say just ‘try’, we do stay in alignment with WTA values in that we make sure that our players, our fans, our staff are in environments and that we are in alignment with our values as it relates to us coming to a particular country, making sure we can operate in alignment with those.
I don’t feel that there’s some limit, but I certainly know that there are cases and instances where we won’t go to certain countries if we don’t have that comfort that we’re going to be able to operate in a way that is in alignment with our goals and with our values.
Q. Because you are seen as someone who has that wider awareness of social issues, is there a message you have for your fans or tennis fans in general who might be gay or women who feel uncomfortable with this event being here?
COCO GAUFF: Yeah, I mean, first for the LGBTQ+ community, for me it’s always a community I’m going to fight for. I have family, friends a part of this community.
Yeah, I think for me, you’re seen and you’re heard. I hear your concerns. I really do feel like in order to ignite change, you have to start little by little. That’s how I’ve been taught growing up black in America, knowing our history. Obviously there were a lot of people opposed, against it. Now we’re all equally living together. If we shied away from it then, where would we be now? The same message goes out there for women. Obviously I’m a woman. I was very concerned. My dad was very concerned with me coming here.
It’s one of those things where I want to see it for myself, see if the change is happening. If I felt uncomfortable or felt like nothing’s happening, then maybe I probably wouldn’t come back.
As far as being here for a week, I really feel like it’s in the progress of going forward. The people I’ve spoken to, they say it’s in that way. I can only trust what I’m being told. Obviously, I don’t live here, so I can only trust what people are telling me that live here.
Q. When you’ve spoken this year about the schedule, a lot of fans believe you’ve spoken a lot of good sense. Since then, you’ve missed a couple of big tournaments. Maybe got fined. I don’t know. Do you feel like your authorities listen when you have things to say on subjects like the schedule?
IGA SWIATEK: Well, I feel like when I first came to WTA, it was pretty tricky. Now I think that they are listening to us much more. I’ve seen some progress in terms of the communication.
Yeah, some things have been decided already in terms of the calendar and mandatory tournaments. It’s something that we kind of can’t take back because this is business, this is our contract, this is money. For sure it’s not going to be easy. It depends.
I guess it’s all going to be about proper planning, making your own decisions kind of, no matter what’s going on with the rankings, mandatory tournaments sometimes. For sure for us as players, the priority should be our health in general.
We’ll see. For now, like, this has been first year with all these mandatory tournament obligations. Maybe at the end of the season there’s going to be a good time to give some feedback and talk about it internally with WTA.
For now obviously we need to be ready for the season to be as long as it is. I’m sure for fans, it’s exciting. I’m going to prepare myself, as well, to be ready to play everything.
Q. How do you feel that the doubles can complement your singles game, how much it helps it, how much you have to compromise because of scheduling?
JASMINE PAOLINI: I think is just a positive thing that I’m playing doubles and singles at the moment. Of course, sometime is tough physically.
I see just the positive things. As I said before, I think it’s not a case or random. I don’t know how to say in English. It came all together, but there is a reason why I start to play more doubles, I improve in singles.
I can see that doubles for me, it’s a positive thing. Of course, we play many matches, but it’s not always like this. For example, in Beijing, I play just two singles, and we won doubles. In Wuhan I played more singles, but we lost first round in doubles. Depends.
I think I am trying to see always the positive things. The positive things is that maybe if I lose singles, I have doubles to stay in the tournament, to play matches, to practice, to be focus on the tournament.
It’s not easy physically, but I think for me is just positive, positive things, yeah.
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