Andreeva, Mirra (2007- )

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    At 19, Coco Gauff Is the Veteran Player in Her U.S. Open Matchup

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    Coco Gauff, at 19, was three years older than her latest opponent in the tournament, Mirra Andreeva, who turned professional last year.As Coco Gauff and Mirra Andreeva faced off at the U.S. Open on Wednesday, fans in the stands remarked about how old — really how young — they were while competing at the top of their sport.Gauff, who at 19 is not much older than the 16-year-old Andreeva, has for several years been a household name in tennis, ever since she made a run to the fourth round of Wimbledon in 2019. Her growing stardom means that she often finds herself playing in featured matches at the U.S. Open, in front of the most fans in person and in choice television slots.On Wednesday, that was in a 6-3, 6-2 win over Andreeva at Arthur Ashe Stadium, playing ahead of Novak Djokovic. It was a matchup, and a moment, that Gauff, a sixth-seeded American, controlled with ease while keeping a breezy but brisk pace.Some of her confidence, Gauff acknowledged, comes with experience. When asked on the court what she had learned in the past three years, Gauff said that when she was 16, she played every match as if it were “life or death.”“You still have to allow yourself time to make mistakes,” she said. “And the losses, as long as you learn from them, are OK.”Andreeva, an unseeded Russian, said after the match that she hadn’t gotten much advice from older players on tour yet, but that she was eager for their wisdom: “I will always listen to them.”Andreeva, left, congratulated Gauff after their match.Clive Brunskill/Getty ImagesAndreeva played in her first tour event this year and has shown some youthful struggles in maintaining her composure on the court. In her last match against Gauff, at the French Open in the round of 32, she hit a ball into the stands, striking a spectator. She received a code violation and acknowledged that she could have been disqualified, calling it a “really stupid move.” She was also fined $8,000 at Wimbledon for unsportsmanlike conduct after throwing a racket, arguing and refusing to shake hands with the chair umpire.Andreeva has defended herself by saying that Roger Federer had outbursts when he was young, too, echoing an argument that other players, like Serena Williams, have made about whether women’s players and men’s players receive similar scrutiny for their conduct.Gauff, who has often been complimented for her composure, said this week that she debated whether to complain during her opening-round match against Laura Siegemund about the pace of play, with Siegemund often pushing the serve clock to its limits.“I really don’t like confrontation all that much,” Gauff said in her postmatch media interview on Monday. She said she had been thinking about the delays the whole match. “I wasn’t sure if I was in the right or not until it happened multiple times,” she said, but she reached a point of frustration and felt the need to speak up to the chair umpire.“I try my best not to let my emotions to take over myself,” she said.Gauff pledged ahead of her second-round match not to be flustered by her opponent this time, and to ignore age — her own and Andreeva’s. “She has her ranking, and that’s all that matters,” Gauff said ahead of their match.Instead, their youthfulness played out in the form of athleticism, as they traded long, sprinting rallies from the baseline and as Gauff found openings to inch forward and finish points.One rally in the second set lasted 30 shots, and ended with Gauff expertly handling a drop shot from Andreeva with a backhand approach shot for a winner. She celebrated that point by urging the crowd to cheer, a request fans quickly obliged.By then, it was clear that Gauff and Andreeva have had no trouble reaching young fans.“It’s amazing that they are so young and they have this amazing skill and talent to just be here and play on that court,” said David Keating, 10, as his father applied sunscreen to him and his twin brother, Michael.Gauff says she has been trying to ignore age as a factor in her matches.Clive Brunskill/Getty ImagesEve Maulshagen, who started playing tennis three years ago and just made her high school team in Central New Jersey, said in the main plaza at Billie Jean King National Tennis Center that she liked the idea that someone at 16 could be playing in front of so many people on TV. “That’ll be me in a year when I’m 16 — but not like a pro,” she said with a laugh.Gauff has been trying to ignore age as a factor during her matches. On Friday, she will play Elise Mertens, a 27-year-old from Belgium, in the third round. They have played twice, and Gauff won both matches, most recently during the French Open in 2022 in the round of 16.“I want to maintain a long career,” Gauff said during her on-court interview on Wednesday. “I have to really have fun on the court and I think I’m having fun with the wins and losses.” More

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      Coco Gauff Has a Chance to Play the Wise Veteran at the French Open

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      Gauff, now 19 and in her fifth season on the tour, took on Mirra Andreeva, who is 16 and the latest teenager to go on a tear in women’s tennis.Tennis moves fast.The veteran tennis star Rafael Nadal recently made that observation, discussing how quickly a new generation of players assumes the role of the one before. His words were never truer than on the Suzanne Lenglen court at Roland Garros on Saturday, where Coco Gauff, now in her fifth season on the tour at 19 years old, was locked in a duel with an opponent who reminded Gauff and everyone else of herself from Wimbledon in 2019.That rival was Mirra Andreeva, a 16-year-old Russian who has exploded onto the women’s tennis tour over the past five weeks.She knocks off top 20 players. She plays with an easy, smooth power, unruffled by the size of the stage and the fuss suddenly being made about her. She trades text messages with Andy Murray, the three-time Grand Slam champion. She makes sarcastic jokes in news conferences in English.A similar hype surrounded Gauff four years ago at the All England Club, beating Venus Williams on Centre Court and rolling into the fourth round, riding a hot streak, limited knowledge and the lazy anticipation that the next Serena had arrived. These days, she continues to hunt for her first Grand Slam and top-level tour title.Glass half-full: Gauff is 19 and is already ranked sixth in singles and third in doubles and still doesn’t have her grown-up strength, as she has said her mother puts it. She is also one of the game’s great athletes, with an active mind and an awareness beyond the lines of the tennis court.Glass half-empty: Gauff has accumulated some baggage in the form of disappointing losses and inconsistent results during the past few months, and she takes that hard. After her loss in the fourth round at the Australian Open, Gauff left the news conference in tears. She knows opponents pick on her forehand. Her serve can disappear in tense moments.And now she’s got talented, free-swinging younger teenagers with a nothing-to-lose attitude like Andreeva’s closing in on her potential as the next big thing.“Transitioning into adulthood,” is how Gauff described her journey in life and tennis on the eve of the French Open.Clodagh Kilcoyne/ReutersIt is both a blessing and a curse of tennis how easy and quickly the declarations of future greatness can come. A couple of early wins, like Andreeva has managed in Paris, on the big stage at a Grand Slam tournament are often all it takes, even if those wins come by an easy draw or catching an opponent on an off day.This is especially true in women’s tennis, where fully developed raw power is less of a requirement and more girls than boys are able to gain enough of it to compete at the highest level. But tour veterans say that one of their biggest fears is playing a hot young player whose tendencies and weaknesses are still unknown.“They always win a bunch of matches because no coach has figured it out yet or broken the code,” said Sloane Stephens, 30, who had her own next-big-thing moments as a teenager.The pandemic, Stephens said, exacerbated the issue. There were so few opportunities to see the teenage prospects on the cusp of the tour because so many junior tournaments were canceled or players could not travel.There is a mental aspect to the dynamic as well. A young player often comes to the court believing she has nothing to lose, and some veterans are certain they are about to teach a lesson to the whippersnapper on the other side of the net.Daria Kasatkina said that older teens in the junior ranks are terrified of playing and losing to younger ones and that fear can extend to the tour, when the youngest players are taking on adults.“At 16, you’re not nervous,” Kasatkina said. “I would say it’s a little advantage. It’s disadvantage, and it’s advantage.”Kasatkina, who is from Russia, was high on her countrywoman, saying she was already physically strong and beating good players on her way to becoming the most talked about newcomer at the French Open.For 65 minutes Saturday, the hype was on track to grow. Andreeva was every bit the match for Gauff, especially in the tight moments.She broke Gauff’s serve when the 19-year-old was serving for the set at 6-5, and then let Gauff give her three set points in the tiebreaker with a shaky forehand and a misfired drop shot. Andreeva whacked a ball into the crowd in anger after losing two of them (“a really stupid move,” she said later), but on her third chance she hit the back of the line on her serve and put away a big forehand to put Gauff in a one-set hole.But then Gauff stopped giving away points, and Andreeva, with around 10,000 fans in attendance, started to show the lesser qualities of her 16-year-old self. She threw her racket on the court when she dropped an early game in the second set. An ugly, soft and looping second serve early in the third set gave Gauff a 3-1 lead, and it was smooth sailing from there.Andreeva later said that after she won the first set, the free-and-easy mood she had been playing with since she survived qualifying slipped away. Suddenly, she started thinking about how she was a set away from the final 16 of her first Grand Slam.“A mistake from me,” she said. “I should have just continued playing.”Andreeva was a difficult opponent for Gauff throughout the match.Clive Mason/Getty ImagesGauff said she told herself that her game plan was essentially working, that she had frittered away a set that she had basically won, but she had also learned how to read body language and to draw confidence when an opponent was growing angry. Chalk one up for age and experience.Gauff, by her own admission, is in the purgatory years of her evolution, both on the court and off.“Transitioning into adulthood,” is how she described it on the eve of the tournament, trying to figure out which qualities from adolescence she wants to hang on to and which ones she wants to discard.Gauff is on the stiffer side of the draw, with a possible quarterfinal match against Iga Swiatek, the world No. 1 who beat Gauff in last year’s final in Paris, if she can get through Anna Karolina Schmiedlova. However, Gauff’s half of the draw became slightly easier Saturday after Elena Rybakina, one of the hottest players in the world this year, withdrew with a respiratory illness.Once more Gauff will be the younger player in her fourth-round match on Monday. Schmiedlova, of Slovakia, is 28 and ranked 100th in the world.She said she was long past factoring those numbers into her approach to matches, but she was highly qualified to give advice to at least one demographic in the professional ranks — the upstarts like Andreeva.“Do it for you,” Gauff said, when asked what she would tell Andreeva about how to approach everything that will, rightly or wrongly, come next after her breakout run in Paris. “Don’t do it for anyone else. When you step on the court you want to make sure it’s for you, and I think life and the game will be a lot more enjoyable that way.” More

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      Can Erika and Mirra Andreeva Become Tennis’ Next Great Sister Act?

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      Women’s tennis was headlined for more than two decades by Serena and Venus Williams. On Tuesday, the teenagers Mirra and Erika Andreeva made their French Open debuts.Long day for the Andreeva family.First came an early rise to get Mirra, a 16-year-old Russian, ready for her 11 a.m. French Open debut against Alison Riske-Amritraj of the United States. Mirra was as efficient as they come, finishing her match Tuesday in 56 minutes by improvising an array of easy, smooth winners against an opponent twice her age.“I just play as I feel inside,” she said.Then came a long wait for Mirra’s older sister, 18-year-old Erika, who was last up on Court No. 14 against Emma Navarro, another American. She took the court just after 7:30 p.m. in Paris. With the sun dropping toward the banks of the Seine, she gave every ounce of energy she had to try to match her sister’s success before Navarro won in three sets, 2-6, 6-3, 6-4, despite Andreeva showing plenty of promise.One family, more than a dozen hours on the grounds of Roland Garros, a 16-year-old in the second round, and an 18-year-old who came oh-so-close. So it goes for tennis’s newest sister act.If this all sounds a bit familiar, it should. Sister acts are not exactly new in women’s tennis, which was headlined for more than two decades by the American duo of Serena and Venus Williams. They won a combined 30 Grand Slam singles titles. Venus Williams, 42, still has not retired, though another major title seems unlikely.More recently, Naomi Osaka of Japan and her sister, Mari, had their moments, though Mari never got higher than 280th in the singles rankings before retiring in 2021 at age 24. Leylah Fernandez of Canada, a 2021 U.S. Open finalist, has partnered in doubles with her younger sister Bianca. This French Open main draw even had another sister duo — Linda and Brenda Fruhvirtova of the Czech Republic. Both lost their opening-round matches.Coaches and parents — who are often one and the same — say the reasons for sisterly success is fairly obvious: never having to look far for a practice partner. Also, the younger sibling grows up with the motivation of trying to overtake the older one. And yet the accomplishment still feels a bit astounding each time it happens, even more so when the journey starts in Siberia, as it did for the Andreevas.Mirra said her mother, Raisa, fell in love with the sport while watching Marat Safin of Russia in the Australian Open in 2005, when he won the tournament. She decided then that she wanted her children to be tennis players.As a toddler, Mirra trailed along to her sister’s tennis practices and matches. At 6, she started playing seriously herself. When the girls showed early promise the family moved from Siberia, which was not exactly teeming with tennis players or tennis friendly weather, to Sochi, Russia, with a mild climate along the Black Sea, and then Cannes, France, where they enrolled in a tennis academy.Mirra said she was about 8 years old when she competed in her first international tennis tournament, an under-12 competition in Germany, where she made the semifinals. At 12, a recruiter for IMG, the sports and entertainment firm, spotted her at a tournament for top juniors.“She was a small player but she was feisty and fighting and just running for the ball and a great competitor and that was the differentiator,” said Juan Acuna Gerard, an IMG agent. “Our recruiter said, ‘This girl is special.’ She was undersized for her age, but fiercely competitive.”The company now represents Erika, too.Erika Andreeva of Russia lost her first-round match to Emma Navarro of the United States in three sets.Julian Finney/Getty ImagesLast month, still not 16, Mirra became one of the youngest players to beat a top-20 opponent, knocking off Beatriz Haddad Maia of Brazil on her way to the round of 16 at the Madrid Open.She said she wasn’t nervous then, or ahead of her match Tuesday. She needed her alarm to wake her up in the morning.“I was excited but in a good way, you know?” Mirra said.The Andreeva sisters worked under the radar on a day when much of Roland Garros was buzzing about one of the biggest upsets in recent memory, as Thiago Seyboth Wild of Brazil, 172nd in men’s singles, beat Daniil Medvedev, the former world No. 1 who is the second seed at the French Open, in five sets.Medvedev, who excels on hard courts, has never been a fan of clay-court tennis or had much success at Roland Garros. But he won the final earlier this month at the Italian Open, the main clay-court tournament ahead of the French Open. It seemed like the victory might have been the beginning of a beautiful friendship between Medvedev, the creative Russian, and the red clay. He declared himself cautiously optimistic about his chances.But Medvedev was never comfortable on a gusty Tuesday afternoon, spraying balls in the wind, double-faulting 15 times and catching an opponent playing the match of his life.“Every time it finishes I’m happy,” Medvedev said of his clay-court season. “I had a mouthful of clay from the third game of the match.”Mirra Andreeva had no such issues. Her biggest problem of the day was that her sister’s match started too late for her to hang around to watch it. That may have been for the best. She said she gets far more nervous watching her sister’s matches than while playing her own.Tuesday evening would have caused plenty of jitters. Erika dropped a messy first set, gritted her way to draw even with a clinic in tennis defense, then surged to a 3-0 lead in the deciding set, only to watch Navarro find her groove and win six of the next seven games. Sitting in the front row, quietly urging her daughter on all evening, Raisa finally left her seat as Erika’s lead slipped away.The loss left Mirra to carry the family torch the rest of the way in Paris. She will face Diane Parry of France on Thursday, no easy task but it beats chemistry, the class that she said befuddles her in her online school.“Chemistry is so bad,” she said. “I don’t understand anything.”Tennis, on the other hand, comes much more naturally. Her coaches — she and Erika have separate ones — give her a game plan before each match. She listens, takes it in, then forgets what she was told almost as soon as she walks onto the court, playing by feel instead.“If I feel that I have to do a drop shot, even though the score is not really appropriate to do a drop shot, I will do it anyways,” she said. “I don’t know how to explain.”For the moment, she does not have to. More