Coco Gauff’s remarkable Wimbledon 2026 campaign reached its end with a semifinal defeat to Karolína Muchová. The match of narrow margins saw the American squander a match point before losing the final-set tiebreak with a 6-2, 1-6, 7-6(10) score.
Although Gauff had one match-point opportunity, her opponent sealed the victory on her second match point. Notably, the 22-year-old made a costly error on match point, a moment she later addressed during her post-match press conference.
Coco Gauff Loses to Karolína Muchová at Wimbledon
Seeded seventh at SW19, Gauff arrived at the tournament without a single grass-court win in two years. The American had also suffered a first-match defeat to Paula Badosa in Berlin, her only grass warm-up event this season. Her impressive run at Wimbledon therefore came as a surprise, with Gauff herself reacting in disbelief to the progress she made.
After a straight-sets win against Tamara Korpatsch, she overcame four consecutive three-setters against Solana Sierra, Claire Liu, Belinda Bencic, and Jessica Pegula. She, however, couldn’t survive Muchová’s challenge.
In her post-match press conference, the two-time Grand Slam champion said, “Obviously, it got super close, and I’m definitely going to think about the (match point) for a while. But overall, I think it was a positive tournament for me. A match to remember.”
“It’s tough to digest, but I don’t know, I’m happy,” she continued, maintaining her composure.
Gauff earned the first match point of the contest at 9-8 in the deciding tiebreak and started the rally well, landing a strong first serve that forced her Czech opponent into a stretched return. The reply fell short, giving Gauff several options and open angles to finish the point. Instead, she opted for an ambitious drop shot that clipped the net. The crowd responded with an audible gasp as the score returned to level.
“There’s one thing to be like, ‘Oh, why play a drop shot?’ Then I also think about how many points I won off the drop shot. People who don’t watch tennis are going to be like, ‘Why did you do that?’ But at the end of the day, that’s the choice I made. Was it the right one in that moment? Maybe not. But also, if I make it, everyone’s going to say how clutch of a shot that was.”
“That’s just tennis. You lose some shots off margins. The return came back in a tricky place for me. I didn’t expect it. The bounce caught me off guard. So I just panicked a little bit. But it takes moments like this to learn from and have a more clear, concise plan of what I want to do. At the end of the day, I left it all out there. My only regret… I don’t have any regrets. I think it’s just points I want to make better decisions on. But that’s how you learn and become a better player,” she continued.
Coco Gauff was the last American standing in both men’s and women’s singles draws after she knocked out Jessica Pegula in the quarterfinal and Taylor Fritz lost his final-eight match against Alexander Zverev.
The 22-year-old was chasing her third Grand Slam title, which would have allowed her to complete the surface Slam, having won the 2023 US Open and the 2025 French Open. She was also bidding to become the first American since Serena Williams in 2016 to win Wimbledon.
