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Sports · US Open 2026 · Women's Singles · Round of 16
Coco Gauff vs Iva Jovic — 6-1 6-4
 Coco Gauff✓ | 6 | 6 |
| Iva Jovic | 1 | 4 |
Final · Monday, September 7, 2026 · Round of 16
Result
Gauff lost the opening game of the match to a double fault — one of only two she hit, by a player who leads the tour this season with 308 of them — and then won six games in a row. Jovic landed 81 per cent of her first serves in that set and won 29 per cent of the points behind them, and did not hold serve once in it. The second set was the match she wanted: she held from the start, broke back for 3-3 when Gauff missed a backhand volley, and led 4-3 with Gauff to serve. Gauff took the last three games. The one that turned it ran to a 24-shot rally at 30-40, which she finished with a forehand winner and a shout; she then broke to love for 5-4 and served out from 0-30, winning the last four points and ending it with a serve-and-volley she had not attempted all match. The idea, she said afterwards, simply arrived, and she decided why not. It is a tenth straight win and a twentieth straight set, and a first US Open quarter-final since she won the title in 2023 — the fourth round had stopped her in each of the last two years.
Coco GauffRows the source hadn’t published are left off rather than guessed.
At this Stage
The Round of 16 is the fourth round, and the point at which a Grand Slam stops being a draw and becomes a tournament you can hold in your head: eight matches, played across Sunday and Monday, and the eight who come through are the quarter-finalists. Everyone still here has won three matches on these courts, so the seedings have stopped being a guide and the form of the fortnight has taken over.
Round of 32
What we know now
Court: Arthur Ashe Stadium
Match length: 1:33
Watch: ESPN · ESPN2 · ABC · ESPN app
What I said beforehand
The preview, frozen before the first serve. Clearly dated, never rewritten — that's the deal that makes the pick worth anything.
Gauff has won nine matches in a row, the last eight in straight sets, and has not dropped a set in New York. Hard-court Elo says 81-19 and every visible thing about the fortnight agrees with it. The reason this is not a formality is that the fourth round is exactly where Gauff has gone out at this tournament in each of the last two years — to Emma Navarro in 2024 and to Naomi Osaka in 2025 — and that Jovic has already taken her to 2h45 and a match point this season. That was Rome in May, on clay, where Jovic won the first set 7-5, served for the quarter-final at 5-4 in the second, held a match point, and lost 5-7 7-5 6-2 having double-faulted ten times to Gauff's one. The double faults are the whole tactical story here from both directions. Jovic told the press after Wimbledon that she had been living and dying off breaking serve and that her first-serve percentage never rose; Gauff, for her part, leads the entire 2026 tour in double faults with 308, made under half her first serves against Bucșa and won anyway. Jovic is 18, ranked 14th, in her third Slam fourth round of the year, and has just come through 3h03 and seventeen breaks of serve against Alexandra Eala on a crowd that mostly wanted the other player. She is a genuinely good bet to make this long. I still take Gauff, shaded down from the ratings, because a serve that misfires against a fellow returner is survivable and a serve that misfires against the best mover in the sport is not.
The case for Coco Gauff
74% to winGauff is the 2023 champion here, a two-time major winner, and on the best run of her season — nine straight wins, the Cincinnati title on 23 August over Pegula, and three rounds in New York without conceding a set. This is her fifth consecutive second week at her home Slam and her 19th Grand Slam fourth round. The serve that defined the last two seasons is a different shot since she brought in the biomechanist Gavin MacMillan a year ago: against Bucșa she made 27 first serves out of 55 and still won 74% behind the first and 73% behind the second, and took 15 of 22 points at the net. She beat Jovic on clay in May from a set and a match point down, which is the version of this match where the pressure is all on the other side of the net.
The case for Iva Jovic
26% to winJovic is 18 and this is her third Grand Slam fourth round of 2026, after a quarter-final in Melbourne — where she was the youngest American woman in the last eight since Venus Williams in 1998 — and the last 16 at Wimbledon. She was ranked 157th in March 2025 and won her first tour title in Guadalajara that September, the youngest champion on tour since Gauff at Parma in 2021. Against Eala she hit 44 winners to 27 unforced errors on a night when the stadium was not hers, saved break points at 4-2 down in the deciding set, and won it on her second match point. She has already had Gauff at a match point once this year, and she is the fresher of the two in a way that has nothing to do with hours: nobody has worked out how to play her yet.
Both cases written 2026-09-06, before the first ball — frozen into the record exactly as written, whatever the result. The percentages are mine — opinions with a percent sign on. They add to 100 because tennis has no draw to hide the rounding in.
My locked pick: Coco Gauff to advance ✓ RIGHT
“Hard-court Elo says 81-19 and Gauff has won nine in a row without dropping a set here. Shaded down because the fourth round is where she has gone out the last two years and Jovic held a match point against her in Rome in May.”
Locked 2026-09-06 12:40 UTC — rendered verbatim from the pick ledger; never a fresher, hedged version
Tale of the tape
Coco GauffIva JovicPlayer vitals: US Open official player feed (usopen.org) and Tennis Abstract career match logs · as of 2026-09-04.
Career head-to-head: Tennis Abstract career match logs (tour-level) · as of 2026-09-06.
Storylines
- They met once before, in the Rome round of 16 on 11 May: Gauff won 5-7 7-5 6-2 in 2h45 after Jovic had served for the match at 5-4 in the second set and held a match point. Jovic served ten double faults to Gauff's one.
- The fourth round is where Gauff has lost at this tournament in each of the last two years — to Navarro in 2024 and to Osaka in 2025, the latter 6-3 6-2.
- Gauff leads the entire 2026 tour in double faults with 308. The next-highest are Alycia Parks and Jelena Ostapenko on 222.
- Jovic's parents emigrated from the former Yugoslavia after her mother won a green card in the lottery; Serbian was her first language, and Djokovic has been giving her advice since the Australian Open.
- Jovic beat Alexandra Eala 7-5 3-6 7-5 in 3h03 with seventeen breaks of serve in 33 games. "It took losing my earrings, falling literally flat-out on the floor, cuts on my knees, mental breakdowns. It took literally everything."
- Five American women are left — Gauff, Jovic, Pegula, Townsend and Navarro — and this match guarantees one of them a quarter-final.
Head to head
One meeting: the Rome round of 16, 11 May 2026, Gauff 5-7 7-5 6-2 in 2h45 on clay. Jovic took the first set, served for the match at 5-4 in the second and held a match point; Gauff broke back on her third break point of the game and won 105 points to 91. Monday is their first meeting on a hard court.
Source: Tennis Abstract career match logs (tour-level) · as of 2026-09-06.
Court & schedule: Arthur Ashe Stadium, Monday 7 September in the night session. The US Open posts each day's order of play the evening before; this one is on the board. (Official US Open order of play, as of 2026-09-07)
Weather: Sunday — the men's final, and the last match of the fortnight — is 78°F with showers and thunderstorms 95% likely, the wettest day of the two weeks and the one day that cannot be pushed back. Ashe closes its roof and plays on. It clears overnight: 20% Sunday night, 20% Monday, then dry and sunny from Tuesday. (National Weather Service New York forecast, as of 2026-09-13)
Venue: USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, Flushing Meadows, New York — hard.