Lucky loser Elisabetta Cocciaretto scored her third Top 10 win, and first outside of a Grand Slam, with a 6-4, 6-2 loss over No. 4 seed Coco Gauff in the second round of the Qatar TotalEnergies Open. The Italian advances to the round of 16 of a WTA 1000 event for the first time.
Doha: Heaps | Giveaways | order of play
But despite achieving one of the best results of his career, Cocciaretto admitted in his on-court interview that his attention is not entirely focused on tennis this week. After all, the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics are currently being held in its home country.
“Well, I think this week is a little different for us in Italy,” he said. “Because now I’m more focused on the Winter Olympics than on the tournament, cheering on the Italian athletes. Maybe that was the key, that’s why I’m playing better. But joking aside, playing more games helps you win more games, for sure.”
Afterwards, Cocciaretto explained that she had been glued to the ski races all week. Before her first-round match against Elsa Jacquemot, she had been cheering on her friend Sofia Goggia, who took the bronze medal in the women’s event on Sunday. Cocciaretto and Goggia met through their mutual clothing sponsor, Emporio Armani.
“Now we are in contact,” he said. “We always text and FaceTime to talk about our sports and how you handle things. She gives me a lot of advice.”
Cocciaretto has never skied (his parents forbade him as too dangerous when he was younger), but his coach, Fausto Scolari, is a native of the Alpine town of Sondrio, and he taught him to appreciate the sport. In fact, Cocciaretto calls alpine skiers his “idols.”
“I love how they approach the sport,” he said. “They are not afraid of anything. They are very focused and put themselves behind everything. If I have a son in the future, I will put him on skiing!”
Keys to success: Cocciaretto was able to bring that bravery to his match with Gauff. She said that in previous years she had set too many limits for herself, but now she is determined to leave them behind.
“YesSometimes I wasn’t sure about myself, about winning some games,” she said. “I came on the court, but I wasn’t really sure about winning that game. So I tried not to put that limit on myself, and go there and maybe have a championship mentality.”
With his playing style of maintaining his baseline and taking the ball as quickly as possible, Cocciaretto signaled his aggressive intent during a first set in which he fired 10 winners to Gauff’s four. The World No. 57 made her move at 2-2, standing inside the baseline on the return and launching a series of magnificent groundstrokes to break.
Maintaining his lead was not easy, but Cocciaretto came up with a resilient sneaker in the decisive moment. Gauff brought it back to 3-3, but Cocciaretto broke again thanks to the best point of the match: a 33-stroke lungbreaker in which both players ran each other, before Cocciaretto was finally able to break through Gauff’s defenses with a backhand. She then saved a break point in each of her next service games and converted her fourth set point with one of her most trusted weapons: the crosscourt backhand.
There was less tension in the second set. Cocciaretto immediately broke with another backhand crosscourt winner and advanced toward the finish line as Gauff’s number of unforced errors rose to 39. The fifth game summed up the American’s problems. Having double faulted to fall 0-40, he played three of his best points of the match to get back within two, only to concede it anyway with another double fault and a tame backhand into the net.
“I tried to be more aggressive and made more unforced errors,” Gauff said. “I tried to be a little more passive, but playing with more form, and she would just take the ball early and smash the ball. I don’t know. I think I need to figure out how to play against players like her, who hit super flat and take everything pretty early. I think the last two games have shown that I’ve been struggling with that.”
Cocciaretto on the rise in 2026: Cocciaretto’s previous Top 10 wins came over Petra Kvitova at Roland Garros 2023 and Jessica Pegula at Wimbledon 2025, but she had not won a set from Gauff in three previous professional meetings. She did have a junior victory over the American to fall back on, however, as she defeated her 2-6, 6-2, 6-2 at the Australian Open in 2018.
He also remembers every detail: from his fellow Italians joking about his unfortunate draw to the game plan he used to win.
“My tactics were to play in the center and move it, and it worked,” he said.
The result continues Cocciaretto’s stellar season so far, in which he has used the qualifying rounds as a springboard to success. In January, she captured her second WTA Tour Driven by Mercedes-Benz title as a qualifier in Hobart. This week she fell in the final round of qualifying to Varvara Gracheva, but entered the main draw as a lucky loser following the withdrawal of McCartney Kessler.
The 25-year-old will face another American, Ann Li, with her first WTA 1000 quarterfinals on the line for both players.
