Coco Gauff's China Open win over Sun Xinran sparked a replay controversy — and then a wave of racist abuse the American star publicly condemned — after she asked to replay a point when the LED boards on the side of the court flickered during a rally.
The incident came on October 5 in Beijing, in Gauff's Round of 32 match against the 16-year-old Chinese wildcard. Serving at 4-5 in the first set, Gauff raised her arm to stop the point as the LED boards flickered; the chair umpire ruled in her favor after a video review. Gauff won the replayed point, steadied, and went on to take the match 7-6, 6-1. The decision angered some fans — particularly because broadcasters noted the boards had flickered earlier in the match and Gauff had played through it — and the 16-year-old Sun, the reigning junior US Open champion, was visibly distressed during the changeover that followed.
What came next was uglier than any line call. Gauff was flooded with racist messages on social media after the match, prompting a direct response on X. "Hey everyone, you can dislike me or disagree about what happened without being racist," she wrote in reply to one vulgar post. "The amount of racist comments/DMs I've received in the last few hours is insane. Lastly, I'm not a cheater or a thief." In a longer explanation, Gauff said she had seen the boards flickering at the start of the point but "was not sure if that is what I actually saw," calling it "an unfortunate situation" that was "out of my control." She said she apologized to Sun after the match and that the teenager "completely understood."
Sun, who had reached the third round by beating Eva Lys and Cristina Bucsa, had given the world No. 4 all she could handle in the opening set before the controversy shifted the match's momentum. Gauff advances to the round of 16, where she will face Elise Mertens.
The episode has split into two debates: whether Gauff's stoppage was legitimate gamesmanship or sharp practice, and — more consequentially — the torrent of racial abuse it unleashed. The first is a tennis argument; the second drew near-universal condemnation. Gauff, a two-time Grand Slam champion still only 22, has faced online abuse before — but rarely has she confronted it as directly as she did in Beijing, drawing a clean line between disagreeing with a call and the racism that followed it.