Coco Gauff beat Sun Xinran 7-5, 6-1 in the third round of the China Open. Sun is 16 and was playing in front of her home crowd.
In the first set, with Sun about to win a point, the electronic advertising boards around the court flickered. Gauff stopped playing and raised her hand. The chair umpire reviewed it and ordered the point replayed. Gauff won the replay, held serve at 5-5 and did not give the match back.
What followed was not an argument about the rule. On October 5, Gauff wrote that the amount of racist comments and direct messages she had received in the previous few hours was insane.
“Hey everyone, you can dislike me or disagree about what happened without being racist,” she wrote.
“Lastly, I’m not a cheater or a thief.”
She also wrote about the 16 year old on the other side of the net. “Xinran is (an) incredible talent and player, I apologized for the situation at the end of the match and she completely understood,” she wrote. She called it an honor to share the court in front of Sun’s home crowd.
So two things happened in Beijing. A chair umpire made a call people are entitled to think was wrong. And a Black woman who won the replayed point spent the next day being called a thief.
Gauff drew the line between those two things herself, in public, in about forty words.
