It has been upsets galore at the 2026 French Open, with some of the biggest men’s seeds going out of the competition. But on Day 7, the women’s draw delivered its biggest shock. Defending champion Coco Gauff was knocked out of the competition. The fourth seed lost 4-6, 7-6(1), 6-4 to 28th-seeded Anastasia Potapova.

This loss now forces the two-time Major champion to face some harsh reality that includes a major drop in Gauff’s rankings, as she was defending 2,000 points from her title run last year. However, this third-round exit for the American player means she will drop a whopping 1870 points, bringing her total to 4879. This will mean the American player will fall out of the Top 5 of the WTA Rankings, currently ranked No. 6. Should the likes of Elina Svitolina and Mirra Andreeva make a deep run in the competition, Gauff might drop further.

The match against Potapova was completely topsy-turvy for Gauff, with the American’s old serving problems resurfacing. She lost her serve in the very first game of the match, and her opponent raced to a 4-2 lead in the first set. However, the American showed excellent grit to turn it around and win the set 6-4. In the second set, there were multiple breaks of serve, and Gauff yet again made a comeback, recovering from a 2-5 deficit to take a 6-5 lead. However, Potapova held her serve and played a dominant tiebreak, winning 4 of the 7 points on Gauff’s serve.

In the final set, Gauff yet again let go of an advantage, as she took a 3-1 lead. However, the American player could not hold serve once again, falling 4-5 behind. With the scoreboard pressure and some great court coverage, Potapova broke the American’s serve one last time to clinch the victory.

This loss comes as a real surprise, as this is Gauff’s earliest exit at Roland Garros since her second-round exit back in 2020. Since then, the American player has reached at least the quarterfinals every year, including winning the title last year and finishing as a runner-up in 2022. However, looking at the head-to-head history between Gauff and Potapova, it was tied at 2-2 before this match, with the Austrian winning the last two encounters in 2023. Despite that, once the draw came out, this was always going to be a banana peel of a match for Gauff in her title defense.

Gauff was in some decent clay-court form coming into Roland Garros, which included a fourth-round run in Madrid and an excellent runner-up finish at the Italian Open, where she lost a close three-set match against Elina Svitolina. Now, the American will have to bounce back in the grass season to regain her ranking, as she has few points to defend.

However, even more so on grass, the American will need her serve, which seems to keep deserting her in crunch situations in matches.

Coco Gauff’s serve poses as a major roadblock

Coco Gauff’s serve is a never-ending story, as the American player has struggled with it since the beginning of her career. In the last couple of seasons, the American player was one of the Tour’s leading players in double faults. Such was the strife with her serve that she engaged the service of a biomechanist last year, the same individual who had been successful in readjusting Aryna Sabelanka’s serve.

Along with her team, Gauff’s initial solution was to roll her first serve in so she could get into a rally, where her strength lay. However, what was meant to be a temporary solution now seems to have taken a permanent course. Despite occasionally having bad days with double faults, Gauff’s first serve percentage remained high due to the above-mentioned tactic.

Gauff hit only three double faults in her third-round match against Potapova at Roland Garros. However, she could only win 34 percent of the second serve points, which saw her serve getting broken 7 times in the match, twice in the third set, both when she had a lead and when she was serving to stay in the match. If one were to look back at the final loss to Svitolina in Rome, one would find similar stats: the American’s serve was broken six times that day.

Gauff is one of the best athletes on the WTA Tour, and her court coverage is second to none, making her a lethal force despite a weak serve. However, this time around, Paris has seen more serve-dominated tennis than ever, as the court quickens under the heat. That is what someone like Potapova used to her advantage, putting pressure on Gauff’s serve, and holding her own, which was enough to knock the defending champion out.