Coco Gauff Calls Out 'Insane' Racist Abuse After Replayed Point at the China Open

One flickering advertising board turned a straight-sets win into a night of racist abuse. Coco Gauff beat Sun Xinran 7-5, 6-1 in the China Open third round on Monday, but the result was overtaken within hours by the messages Gauff says flooded her accounts, which she called “insane” in a post on X early on Tuesday, Reuters reports. The trigger was a single replayed point late in the first set.

What happened on the disputed point?

Gauff was serving to stay in the set at 4-5 when the rally turned. As Sun, the 16-year-old home favourite, appeared about to put away a winner, Gauff raised her hand and stopped playing, saying an electronic advertising board beside the court had flickered during the rally, Reuters and USA Today report.

After a discussion and a video review, the chair umpire ordered the point replayed. Gauff won the replay, then the next two points to hold for 5-5, and dropped only one more game in the match. Sun, a wild card on her WTA Tour debut, was left distraught at the end of her first senior tournament, CNN reports.

Was Gauff entitled to stop play?

Yes, and the distinction matters for everything that followed. Players are allowed to request video reviews of select judgment calls, including claims that a distraction interfered with play, Reuters reports. Gauff explained that the boards had flickered from the start of the point but that she was not sure at first what she had actually seen, USA Today reports.

The replay decision belonged to the umpire, not to Gauff. Beijing has now seen the review system cut both ways in the same week: it produced the replay here, and it sat behind Djokovic calling the rule ‘stupid’ after Alexander Zverev’s point was replayed earlier in the tournament. A let in tennis works on the same principle: an outside interference wipes the point, whoever it inconvenienced.

What exactly did Gauff say about the abuse?

She replied to a post that contained a racial slur, and she did not soften it. Gauff wrote that people can dislike her or disagree about what happened without being racist, that the amount of racist comments and direct messages she had received in a few hours was “insane”, and, pointedly, “I’m not a cheater or a thief”, Reuters, CNN and USA Today all report.

She also separated the opponent from the crowd noise. Gauff wrote that Sun is an incredible talent, that she apologised for the situation at the net and Sun completely understood, and that she did not like seeing the teenager so emotional because she has been in that position herself, Reuters reports.

How big is the abuse problem the WTA is measuring?

Bigger every year, on the tour’s own numbers. A study by the WTA and World Tennis counted more than 12,000 abusive posts and messages directed at players on social media in 2025, up from about 8,000 a year earlier, Reuters reports. The WTA has responded with an AI-powered system that monitors thousands of players and officials.

That context is the value of Gauff’s post beyond one bad night. The system can flag volume; it cannot explain to a home crowd why a 16-year-old’s dream point was replayed, or stop a disputed ruling becoming a racial pile-on before the player has left the stadium. This tournament has already lost its top two women’s seeds on consecutive days and seen Daniil Medvedev disqualified for hitting a ball into the crowd; Gauff’s win is the third Beijing story in a week where the tennis was not the headline.

What happens next?

On court, the fourth round. Off it, a response the tour has not yet given: Reuters has contacted the WTA and the Beijing organisers for comment, and none had been published in the first wave of reporting.

Gauff, 22 and ranked fourth in the world, is one of the players the monitoring system was built to protect, and she sits high on any list of the greatest female tennis players of the modern era debates for her age. Her argument on Tuesday was narrower than any of that: disagree with the call all you want, but the disagreement does not need a slur in it. The next test is whether the bodies she named answer her as publicly as she answered the abuse.