Although the 2024 Paris Olympics are still a few months away from starting, Coco Gauff can immediately make travel arrangements for the showpiece event.
At the start of the week, tennis statisticians ratified Gauff's qualification for the Olympics tennis tournament, which is scheduled to begin on July 27th and will be played at Stade Roland Garros, the venue of the French Open.
The 20-year-old has mathematically secured her spot in the 64-player singles draw for accumulating and meeting the cut-off points in the Olympics race. The Top 56 players in the draw must qualify based on their actual ranking as of June 10th, 2024.
Gauff is also the first U.S. tennis player to book her spot at the event where a single nation can be represented by a maximum of its four best-ranked players in the Top 56. It will be the Delray native's Olympics debut after missing the 2021 event in Tokyo after testing positive for Covid-19.
The USA is expected to utilize all those spots in both the men's and women's tournaments, given its huge number of higher-ranked players. Gauff led the Olympics race for a few months until she was overtaken by Iga Swiatek last month.
But qualifying is all that matters for the 2023 US Open champion, who spoke to reporters during her pre-tournament press conference at the Miami Open. She admitted that it wasn't a "shock" to learn about it, but she is hoping to do well.
"I’ll be honest, it wasn’t much of a shock. I didn’t even know that, you know, there is like a numbers thing that people are keeping track of, but it wasn’t a shock. I’m just really happy that I was able to [qualify], and hopefully, you know, everything goes smoothly."
While Gauff is the first American tennis player to qualify for the 2024 Olympics, she is not the first WTA player overall to qualify. That honor belongs to Qinwen Zheng of China, who won a gold medal at the Asian Games last year, which is a direct ticket to the draw.
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