“I thought she just played at a really high level and didn’t really have many dips,” Pegula said. “I didn’t really think I played bad. The more you construct the point (against her), the worse it is because she almost likes to run. It was tough today. A dangerous, confident Coco is going to New York.”<\/p>\n
The head-to-head series between Gauff and Pegula is now tied at five apiece. Sunday was their second meeting in a final, with Gauff winning at Wuhan last year.<\/p>\n
The Fils-Tiafoe match was the first time two Black players have met in an ATP Masters 1000 final.<\/p>\n
Fils is the third Black man to win a Masters 1000 title, joining Ben Shelton, who won twice in Canada, and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, who won in Paris in 2008 and Canada in 2014.<\/p>\n
At 22 years old, Fils is the youngest French champion in Masters 1000 history. He became the second French player to win a Cincinnati final, joining Guy Forget in 1991.<\/p>\n
“Very happy with that,” Fils said. “It’s been a tough last year. I didn’t play the French Open (due to a hip injury). I lost early in Washington. People think that I’m done. But here we are. I got the title.”<\/p>\n
It was the second time Tiafoe has appeared in the Cincinnati Open final, losing to Jannik Sinner in 2024. He was looking to become the first American male to win in Cincinnati since Andy Roddick in 2006.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“I thought she just played at a really high level and didn’t really have many dips,” Pegula said.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":56333,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[256,217,2890,185],"class_list":["post-56332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-aryna-sabalenka","tag-arthur-fils","tag-aryna-sabalenka","tag-cincinnati-open","tag-coco-gauff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56332"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56332\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}