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Remarkable Unearthed Clip Shows 8-Year-Old Coco Gauff at Venus Williams' US Open Match
This was a small hint at the future Olympian's incredible future.
Coco Gauff basically manifested her career.
The Olympics-bound tennis prodigy started playing — and watching — the game at a young age, but at 8 years old, could she have known she'd one day win the US Open? A newly unearthed clip hints at her spectacular future.
See the remarkable video here.
Coco Gauff at Venus Williams' 2012 US Open Match 11 years before winning herself
Thanks to extra footage from the 2012 US Open, eagle-eyed tennis fans have noticed one very special young girl in the stands behind tennis star Venus Williams: None other than Gauff, who at the time was only 8.
In the foreground, a focused and determined Williams takes a breath and collects herself during a break in the match. Behind her a young girl, applauding, pops in and out of frame. Yup, that's Gauff.
"If this isn’t proof that your dreams are closer than you think then idk what is," Gauff herself, now 20 years old, tweeted on X (formerly known as Twitter) April 11 along with screenshots from the throwback moment.
Coco Gauff wins the 2023 US Open
In September 2023, then 19-year-old Gauff became the youngest American to win the US Open since Venus' sister Serena Williams claimed the title in 1999. "It's still crazy," the tennis phenom told TODAY the Monday following her victory. "Even last night I was telling myself, 'You're a Grand Slam champion,' and it doesn’t feel real at all."
“I feel like it hit all at once because I didn’t want to tell myself it was match point on the match points, I didn’t want to start shaking. So when it happened and like, finally it was over, my previous matches (have) taken me like six, seven match points to win and that was on the first one so I was a little bit shocked and I couldn’t breathe either,” she added.
Coco Gauff to compete at the 2024 Paris Olympics
This summer, she will take on the best of the best in the City of Lights, competing in the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, France. Three years ago, Gauff qualified for the pandemic-delayed 2021 Games in Tokyo, but withdrew after testing positive for COVID-19. We can only imagine that this year she's taking every precaution to make sure she makes it onto the court.
“One of the goals I wrote down on my vision thing, vision note, in my phone, was to win a medal in the Olympics,” Gauff said at the start of the year, per NBC Sports. “I’ll be completely honest, I don’t really care what event it is in. I feel like a gold, silver or bronze, whatever medal it is, is one of those things it doesn’t matter. Well, it does matter. Obviously I want to win in singles. I feel like I would appreciate it just as much whether it was in singles or doubles. It’s not the same to me as a Slam, I guess, in a way. I just put ‘I want a medal at any of the events.’”
