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(CNN) — Coco Gauff produced an impressive comeback win to reach the Australian Open quarterfinals on Sunday, eventually downing Belinda Bencic 5-7 6-2 6-1.
The victory continued Gauff’s unbeaten start to 2025 and marked her ninth consecutive win to start the year – a milestone she has now reached three times in her career. Only Margaret Court, Steffi Graf, Monica Seles and Serena Williams have enjoyed this many perfect starts to their seasons.
“It’s pretty crazy to be amongst the same stat line as legends and I’m very grateful,” the No. 3 seed said in her on-court interview after being told about those statistics.
Afterwards, she mourned popular social media site TikTok shutting down in the US ahead of a ban slated to come into effect Sunday, drawing a broken heart on one of the TV camera lenses courtside and writing: “RIP TikTok.”
“Hopefully it comes back. It’s really sad … I love TikTok. It’s like an escape. I honestly do that before matches,” she told reporters.
“I guess it’ll force me to read books more, be more of a productive human probably. Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise.”
Such has been Gauff’s form this year that she hadn’t even dropped a set before playing Bencic.
But Bencic, the 2020 Olympic champion who is playing in her first grand slam since returning from maternity leave, matched Gauff stride for stride in a hard-fought first set filled with long rallies.
Eventually, the Swiss player broke Gauff at 4-4 after two marathon rallies at deuce.
Gauff then engineered a break point of her own in the next game. With Bencic just two points away from winning the set, the American’s athleticism allowed her to scamper all over the court and fire a backhand winner down the line to seal the break back.
But she was unable to hold her serve and Bencic broke once more, before completing a 7-5 win in the first set in 62 minutes.
Gauff came out firing on all cylinders in the second and won three consecutive games to begin, her more aggressive approach characterized by an overhead smash that made it 3-0.
From there, the 2023 US Open champion made it seem easy, dropping just three games across the second and third sets.
“It’s funny because I felt like a couple of years ago I had a really bad flat line, where if I lost the first set I’d lose the match, and I remember my Dad was like: ‘You have to get some fight in you’, so every time I think about that and dig deeper,” she said afterwards.
Gauff will now face No. 11 seed Paula Badosa on Tuesday for a place in the semifinals.
Elsewhere, two-time defending champion Aryna Sabalenka coasted past 17-year-old Mirra Andreeva 6-1 6-2 to secure her own spot in the quarterfinals.
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