For Gauff, the training made perfect the historic victory in Beijing

Coco Gauff struggled a bit on the way to the China Open final.

She has a brand new coaching staff and has been working on a few things. In her mind, Gauff was playing practice games. Unsurprisingly, she lost the opening set in the fourth round, quarterfinals and semifinals.

This is when their competitive intensity came to the surface. On the other hand, she won all three games in three sets – against Naomi Osaka, the qualifier Yuliia Starodubtseva and Paula Badosa.

Beijing: Results | Pulls

However, Sunday's final was something completely different because the American is a excellent Tournament closer. The double faults and unforced errors that had dogged her in previous rounds disappeared and Gauff prevailed with a resounding 6-1, 6-3 victory over Karolina Muchova.

In 16 years of WTA 1000 matches, Dinara Safina is the only other player to win a final after losing the first set of her three previous matches.

The secret, Gauff later explained, was to go in with a relaxed state of mind.

“I just thought, 'This game isn't going to change my life,'” she said. “I knew I was proud despite today’s result. Honestly, the whole game I just told myself that I was proud of myself for how I was able to master the things that I was practicing and still working on it and sticking with it.”

With a historic statistic, Gauff has now won each of her first seven hardcourt finals on the Hologic WTA Tour, something no other woman has achieved in more than half a century of the Open era. In the final she is 8-9 overall.

“Honestly, when you get this far, you’re just happy to be in the final,” explained Gauff. “I think it's just about being relaxed. My first final when I was 15 is like the worst because you think, “I’ll never get this chance again,” which is absolutely not true. That's how I felt in my first Grand Slam final.

“I think the experience of winning in the past has shown me that winning is great. It feels great right now. But tomorrow I will wake up and it will be a different day. Seventy percent of the world doesn’t know whether I won or lost, probably even more.”

In 2023, Gauff won titles in Washington, D.C., Cincinnati and New York, her first major championship. Relatively speaking, 2024 was a quiet year for Gauff.

After losing in the fourth round of this year's US Open, she and her team fired coach Brad Gilbert – in some eyes the architect of that breakthrough – after 14 months.

Matt Daly, who coached Denis Shapovalov last year, accompanied Jean-Christophe Faurel in Beijing for her debut with Team Gauff. They are now a perfect 1-on-1 and Gauff will carry that confidence into the final WTA 1000 of the season, the Dongfeng Voyah · Wuhan Open, where matches begin on Monday.

Before the final, Muchova described Gauff as “a moving wall” and added: “It's difficult to hit some winners and make it shorter.”

That defensive threat seemed to manifest itself in the first set as Muchova tried to force the issue but kept missing.

Is there something about Gauff's game that makes Muchova uncomfortable?

“Probably yes,” Muchova told reporters afterwards. “I mean, I lost to them three times in a row. I would say very similar losses. It was always the last rounds of the tournaments in which I played a lot of games.

“It's very physical with her. I always felt like I was second in the rallies.”

Gauff was relentless and broke Muchova's previously unbreakable serve five times. Gauff was credited with 24 winners with just eight unforced errors. Muchova's numbers were the opposite: 14 and 24.

When Gauff wins the opening set, it's over. She has won 37 of her last 39 matches in the first frame and has now won 21 in a row, losing just one of those second sets.

This means that the 20-year-old Gauff joins an elite class of early top performers and is, after Bianca Andreescu, the second youngest player since the introduction of the WTA 1000 format to win her first two WTA 1000 finals.

Gauff is the fourth player, alongside Iga Swiatek, Caroline Wozniacki and Andreescu, to win multiple WTA 1000 titles before the age of 21. Gauff is also the youngest player to play more than 100 matches (101) in the WTA 1000.

“I feel like every tournament there is a new statistic or a new record,” Gauff said. “I am very grateful.

“(Winning), it feels great. It is a personal achievement. I think it's becoming clearer to me every day that tennis is not a measure of my worth as a person. I think the more you realize that, the more relaxed these tournaments become.”