Boris Becker Backs Coco Gauff After She Reveals Racist Abuse Following Beijing Controversy

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 7, 2026 — BEIJING — Coco Gauff revealed Tuesday that she was hit with an “insane” wave of racist abuse following her China Open win in Beijing, and Boris Becker has backed her with a message of support telling her to keep walking tall. The controversy traces to one flickering light and one replayed point in Gauff’s 7-5, 6-1 third-round victory over 16-year-old Sun Xinran on Monday — a call made within the rules that curdled online into something much uglier.

02 The Point That Started It All

Gauff was serving at 4-5 in the opening set, 15-15, when the LED advertising boards lining the court began flickering in the middle of a rally. Sun, the Chinese wild card making her WTA Tour debut, thought she had cracked a cross-court winner. But Gauff had already raised her hand to stop play — she said the flickering light distracted her — and under the tour’s hindrance rules, a player can request a video review when outside interference affects a point. The chair umpire went to the video, and the ruling came back: replay the point.

She won the replayed point. She held for 5-5. She broke Sun in the 11th game and served out the set 7-5. The teenager — this year’s US Open girls’ singles champion — was in tears at the changeover, and from there the match ran away from her: Gauff dropped one game the rest of the way and closed it out 6-1 to reach the fourth round.

Was it the right call? By the letter of the rules, Gauff did what any player is entitled to do. The hindrance rule exists precisely for moments like this, and the video review confirmed the timing — her hand went up before Sun’s shot crossed the net. Whether the flicker actually decided the point is a question nobody on the internet can answer, but plenty of people had opinions about it anyway.

03 The Crowd, and the Noise After

The Beijing crowd let Gauff hear it, briefly. There were boos after the replay was ordered — understandable from a partisan crowd watching a home 16-year-old lose a point she thought she had won. Gauff addressed it in her post-match press conference: “That one point where I had to do the VR, I got a boo for half a second. I think they thought I was complaining about the crowd at first. Once they realised it was about the lights, then I think they were okay.”

Inside the stadium, it passed. Online, it didn’t. Criticism of the call curdled quickly into something uglier, and Gauff said the messages kept coming for hours — with some of them having nothing to do with tennis at all.

04 “I’m Not a Cheater or a Thief”

On Tuesday, Gauff answered one of them directly. A post on X aimed a racial slur at her along with a stream of profanity. She posted a reply that has since traveled around the world: “Hey everyone, you can dislike me or disagree about what happened without being racist. The amount of racist comments/dms I’ve received in the last few hours is insane. Lastly, I’m not a cheater or a thief.”

Read that last line again. A 22-year-old, a two-time Grand Slam champion ranked fourth in the world, felt the need to tell the internet she is not a cheater and not a thief — because she asked an umpire to look at a flickering light. That is where this story actually lives. Not in the rulebook. In the gap between what happened on the court and what the worst people online decided she was.

05 Becker Answers Back

It didn’t take long for the sport to rally around her. Becker posted his response on X: “Coco! You are a proud black woman and we love you! Don’t care or look at any of the comments from the ignorant, stupid people. You’re special and one of a kind! Keep walking straight with your head held up high! Love from the Becker family!”

Martina Navratilova and Victoria Azarenka added their voices as well. Azarenka called the whole episode unfortunate and pointed at a real structural problem: the lack of consistency around video review in tennis — when it’s available, how it’s applied, and who gets to ask for it.

That’s the part of this story that deserves to outlast the news cycle. The hindrance rule and the video review exist to get calls right, and in Beijing they worked as designed. But the inconsistency Azarenka flagged — different tournaments, different technology, different thresholds — is why every one of these calls becomes a referendum on the player who asked for it instead of on the system that made the call.

06 The Bigger Picture

None of this is new for Gauff. She has been one of the most outspoken young athletes in sports since she was 15 — on racial justice, on voting, on the pressure that comes with being a Black woman at the top of a historically white sport. She handles it with a directness that keeps catching people off guard: no statement through a representative, no 48-hour cooling period, just her phone and the truth.

She is also, it is worth remembering, still in the tournament. The fourth round of the China Open is next, and the draw does not pause for discourse. Gauff has made a habit of playing her best tennis with the noise turned all the way up. If Beijing is any indication, that habit is intact.

For the sport, though, the question lingers past this week: how many times does one of its brightest stars have to log on and defend her basic humanity before the platforms — and the culture around the game — treat that as the emergency it is? Previously’s sports desk will keep following Gauff’s Beijing run; see our nightly news wrap for the rest of Tuesday’s top stories.