Coco Gauff walked off in Beijing yesterday admitting she had been “just a bit flat,” according to the WTA. A few hours later she was out of the Wuhan Open as well, the tournament where she is the defending champion and where, the WTA noted, she won the title last year without dropping a set.
“I’m disappointed to withdraw from Wuhan, especially as the defending champion,” Gauff said in a statement the tournament posted to its Instagram story, according to the WTA. “I always love playing there. After a long year, my body needs some time to rest and recover. I look forward to returning next year.”
Her last match of the Asian swing was a 6-3, 6-3 fourth-round defeat by Elise Mertens in which she hit 34 unforced errors, eight of them double faults, as GTN reported on Wednesday. “I think I just didn’t play well,” Gauff told reporters afterwards, according to the WTA. “I think I wasn’t moving well. There were a lot of things I didn’t do well.”
Naomi Osaka will miss Wuhan too, the tournament announced. She also went out in the Beijing round of 16, beaten 5-7, 6-1, 7-6(7) by Karolina Muchova in 2 hours and 52 minutes after leading by a break in both the first and third sets. Muchova won on her ninth match point, the WTA said. Zheng Qinwen, the home favorite who is still in the field in Beijing, takes Osaka’s place in the Wuhan draw, according to the tournament.
The field. Gauff and Osaka are not the only absentees. World No. 1 Elena Rybakina and Amanda Anisimova will also miss Wuhan, the WTA said. Anisimova has shut down her season to recover from a wrist injury, according to the WTA, after the problem that first kept her out of Singapore. That leaves Aryna Sabalenka projected as the top seed at the last WTA 1000 of the season, according to the WTA.
The race. Gauff’s withdrawal costs her the last 1000-level points on offer before the WTA Finals at Indian Wells, which the WTA calendar places in the week of 9 November. She sat fifth in the PIF WTA Race to the Finals on 5,654 points in the standings the WTA published on Wednesday, after Mirra Andreeva moved past her into fourth on 5,722.
Jessica Pegula was third on 5,825. Rybakina, on 7,492, and Sabalenka, on 6,485, were the only two singles players marked as qualified. Behind Gauff were Elina Svitolina on 4,809, Muchova on 4,400 and Linda Noskova on 4,234. How the eight places are decided is set out in GTN’s WTA Finals qualification explainer.
Gauff was not among the top-10 players the WTA listed in the field for the Pan Pacific Open in Tokyo, the last WTA 500 of the year, in its preview of that event last week.
The rule. Under the WTA’s 2026 rulebook, a player accepted into the main draw of a WTA 1000 must play it and a player receives a zero-point result for each commitment tournament she does not play, which must count on her singles ranking. The exemptions are covered in GTN’s guide to WTA mandatory events.
What comes next. The China Open finishes on Sunday 11 October. Wuhan’s first round starts on Monday 12 October, and both the singles and doubles finals are on Sunday 18 October, according to the WTA. The main draw has 56 players. GTN’s Wuhan Open guide covers the format, prize money and past champions.
