Coco Gauff beats Jessica Pegula in first all-American Cincinnati final since 1970

Coco Gauff defeated Jessica Pegula 6-2, 6-4 on Sunday to win the Cincinnati Open, completing the first all-American women's final at the tournament since 1970 and denying her close friend and Billie Jean King Cup teammate a first title of the season on home soil. The match, played before a sellout crowd at the Lindner Family Tennis Center, took Gauff just one hour and 14 minutes to close out, a lopsided scoreline that belied the stakes for both players heading into the US Open.

It was Gauff's second Cincinnati championship, following her breakthrough run in 2023, and made her only the third woman in the tournament's history to win the title twice, joining Serena Williams and Victoria Azarenka. For the 22-year-old, ranked No. 4 in the world according to the WTA singles rankings, the trophy arrived after a season in which she had reached finals at both Rome and Miami without lifting a trophy at the WTA 1000 level, and it doubled as a statement of form three weeks before she begins the defense of her 2023 US Open title in New York.

The numbers

Gauff's run through the draw was built on the kind of dominant hard-court tennis that had been missing from her season. After dropping the first set of her opening match against Liudmila Samsonova, she won 12 consecutive sets and surrendered only 32 games across the rest of the week, a stretch that included a straight-sets win over Marta Kostyuk in the quarterfinals and a 6-4, 6-1 semifinal defeat of the unseeded Czech player Sara Bejlek. In the final itself, Gauff won 65 percent of points on her first serve against 47 percent for Pegula and converted five of six break-point chances, numbers that reflected an aggressive, front-foot approach she has credited to offseason changes to her service motion.

The victory was worth 1,000 ranking points and a winner's check of $1,085,200, according to prize money figures published by the WTA. Pegula, who reached her fifth final of the season, collected 650 points and $564,920 for the runner-up finish, enough to lift her past the $7 million mark in career ranking points. Gauff's twelfth career WTA Tour title, and fourth at the 1000 level, moves her total ranking-point haul to 6,704, though Aryna Sabalenka retained the world No. 1 position after Elena Rybakina, the tournament's top seed, retired injured during her quarterfinal match.

How the final came together

The all-American final was set up over a dramatic Saturday in which both semifinals ran well past their expected finish times. Pegula needed two hours and 48 minutes to eliminate defending champion Iga Swiatek 7-5, 4-6, 6-4, a result that snapped Swiatek's ten-match winning streak and marked Pegula's 300th tour-level career victory, according to the official WTA recap of the match. It was Pegula's second win over a defending Cincinnati champion in three years and put her into her second final at the event.

The last time two American women met in the Cincinnati final was in 1970, when Rosie Casals beat Nancy Richey 6-3, 6-3, a gap of 56 years that tournament organizers and both players referenced repeatedly during finals weekend. The tournament, now known as the Cincinnati Open, is one of the oldest continuously running tennis events in the United States. The women's final followed a men's championship match earlier the same day in which France's Arthur Fils beat American Frances Tiafoe in three sets for his first ATP Masters 1000 title, meaning the tournament's home country produced a finalist, if not a champion, in both singles draws.

Who is affected

The result reshapes the picture heading into the US Open, where both Gauff and Pegula will be seeded among the favorites. Gauff arrives with the form and the recent history of a hard-court major win, having lifted her first Grand Slam trophy in New York in 2023 before winning her first Cincinnati title that same summer. The pattern is one both players and their coaching teams are aware of: Gauff's best hard-court tennis this season has tended to arrive in bursts, and a 12-set run without a loss is the clearest evidence yet that this version of her game is peaking at the right time. Pegula, a three-time major semifinalist who has never advanced to a Grand Slam final, leaves Cincinnati with her ranking bolstered and her case as a genuine US Open contender strengthened, even in defeat. She has now reached five finals in 2026, more than any other woman on tour, and head-to-head history is on her side: Pegula leads the pair's overall series 5-4, though Gauff has won their two most recent meetings, at Wuhan last year and in this year's Wimbledon quarterfinal.

The final also underscored the depth of the current generation of American women's tennis. The United States has more women in the WTA top 100 than any other nation, with 15 ranked players, and Sunday's match put two of them on the same stage for a national title for the first time in over five decades, a fact not lost on a crowd that packed the Lindner Family Tennis Center's grandstands in suburban Cincinnati. The last comparable moment for the sport domestically came when Serena and Venus Williams met across a string of major finals in the 2000s; Sunday's match was a reminder that the current wave of American players, several of whom came through the junior ranks together, is producing a similar depth of competition near the top of the sport.

Rybakina's early exit was also felt across the draw. The Kazakh, seeded first in Cincinnati and one of the tour's most dangerous hard-court players, retired from her quarterfinal match with an injury, a withdrawal that reshuffled the bottom half of the bracket and ultimately opened a path for Pegula to reach a final that otherwise would have required beating both the top seed and the defending champion. Świątek's exit at Pegula's hands, in turn, ended a ten-match winning streak the Pole had built since Wimbledon and denied her the chance to defend the Cincinnati title she won in 2025.

• Gauff def. Pegula 6-2, 6-4 in 1 hour, 14 minutes
• First all-American Cincinnati women's final since 1970
• Gauff's second Cincinnati title, twelfth career WTA title
• Pegula reached her tour-leading fifth final of 2026

Reaction

Gauff was quick to credit the progress in her game that had been building over the season. "I think it was a long journey, but I'm happy," she said afterward, according to comments carried by ESPN. "It's night and day, the player I was last year to now." She was also warm toward her opponent in her on-court remarks, telling the crowd, "You're an incredible player, that goes without saying, and always playing you is tough."

"Gosh, you were like a backboard today. It was not fun to play against. I didn't even think I played bad. I just think you played a really, really high level," Pegula said in her runner-up speech.

Pegula's message doubled as an assessment of the season she has put together even without a Cincinnati title to show for it. Her semifinal win over Swiatek was, by her own account, one of the more physically demanding matches of her career, and she has now reached more finals than any other woman on tour in 2026.

What happens next

Both players now shift their attention to New York, where the US Open begins next week. Gauff will arrive as one of the players to beat on hard courts after her Cincinnati run, while Pegula, seeded in the top four, will look to convert a season of consistency into a deep major run for the first time. The tournament also offered an early data point on the state of the WTA's Race to the season-ending Finals in Indian Wells, a field both Americans are competing to reach. For Cincinnati, the all-American women's final was the signature result of a tournament that heads next to New York, where the sport's attention now turns to its final major of the year.