Coco Gauff Opens US Open Defense Chasing the World No 1 Ranking She Has Never Held

NEW YORK — The last time Coco Gauff stood in the main draw at Flushing Meadows, she left with a trophy. She came back on Wednesday with something harder to carry: the knowledge that winning this tournament could finally deliver the one thing her career still lacks.

The world No. 4 opened her US Open title defense with a 6-3, 6-4 win over Turkey’s Zeynep Sönmez at Arthur Ashe Stadium, her serve consistently touching 120 miles per hour and her baseline game absorbing whatever Sönmez could manufacture in an hour and twenty minutes. It was a match played behind a closed roof, with rain at Flushing Meadows having suspended other matches across the grounds, and under that roof Gauff did not look like someone trying to defend anything. She looked like someone trying to take something.

Sönmez, ranked 54th, found one opening. In the second set, she broke Gauff to level the score at 2-2. The crowd, which had watched Gauff move through the first set without complication, went slightly quieter. Gauff broke back without apparent distress.

“I was just trying not to panic,” Gauff said after the match. “I like to challenge my opponent to let them keep up the level the whole match.”

They could not. After the break went back, Gauff did not drop another game. She closed the second set 6-4, accepted the handshake, and walked off Arthur Ashe as the defending champion who had just answered the first question of the fortnight.

The bigger questions remain.

Gauff has won two Grand Slam titles: the 2023 US Open at 19 years old, and the 2024 French Open in Paris the following spring. She has played in four Grand Slam finals and won two of them. What she has not done, in roughly three years as a Grand Slam-level player, is hold the world No. 1 ranking.

That could change at Flushing Meadows this September, with conditions attached.

The path requires Gauff to win the tournament and requires Aryna Sabalenka, the current world No. 1 and the 2026 Australian Open champion, to fall before the semifinals. Neither condition is entirely in Gauff’s control. One is. She opened Wednesday by addressing the one she can address.

Two weeks before the US Open main draw began, Gauff won the Western and Southern Open in Cincinnati, defeating world No. 4 Jessica Pegula 6-2, 6-4 in a final that was not as close as the scoreline suggests. The Cincinnati title was the sharpening agent: a proof of form on hard courts heading into a fortnight where everything she has practiced for since the 2023 title would be required.

As Yahoo Sports reported, Gauff needs to win the tournament and needs Sabalenka to fall before the semifinals for the ranking to change hands. Sabalenka, who is also still in the draw, has shown physical inconsistency this season. Whether she cooperates with Gauff’s arithmetic is a question for the second week.

The 2026 US Open has opened with stories that have complicated the usual seeding logic. Novak Djokovic’s first-round exit, his first at a Grand Slam in twenty years, remade the men’s draw overnight. On the same bracket, Carlos Alcaraz returned from four months out with a wrist injury, advanced, and announced he plans to skip tournaments in future seasons because the ATP’s mandatory calendar is impossible to sustain. In the wheelchair quad draw, Guy Sasson is within one title of completing the first wheelchair doubles calendar Grand Slam in history.

Gauff’s campaign sits at the center of the women’s draw with more at stake than a title defense. The world No. 1 ranking, held by Sabalenka for most of the past two seasons, has not passed to Gauff in three years of trying. The conditional path, requiring a specific sequence of results that Gauff can only partly control, means that Wednesday’s match answered nothing about the ranking and everything about the will to keep asking.

Gauff’s second-round opponent is either Paula Badosa or Daria Kasatkina, whose first-round match was suspended due to rain Wednesday evening. Badosa’s flat pace and Kasatkina’s slice backhand have each created difficulties for Gauff in earlier seasons. Neither is a comfortable next step for a defending champion still finding her range at the start of the fortnight.

She is 21, and the building she walked back into on Wednesday was the one where she became a Grand Slam champion three years ago. She knows what it sounds like when it turns in your direction.

What she does not know, and what nobody can calculate yet, is whether Sabalenka will fall on the right side of the bracket at the right time. The ranking requires it. The title does not. On Wednesday, Gauff separated those two things cleanly: she won the match in front of her and left the ranking question for later.

Later, in this draw, comes fast.