A Thrilling Accomplishment: Caroline Garcia and Borna Coric Beat Three Top-10 Seeds Each to Advance to the Cincinnati Final
A Thrilling Accomplishment: Making a strong point. That’s precisely what Caroline Garcia and Borna Coric have done this week at the Western & Southern Open, beating three Top 10 seeds each on their way to the title match on Sunday in Cincinnati.
Garcia’s Win
Garcia was the first to do it. On a rainy Saturday, she had to start and stop a lot to get to her semifinal match with Aryna Sabalenka. When the match finally started again, the French woman was up 3-1 in the third set. She raced to the finish line to win 6-2, 4-6, 6-1.
“I guess no one expected it, that’s for sure (smiling). It’s a long way to come from qualies,” she said afterward. “I was not too far out of main draw. I asked for a wild card, top 20, didn’t get it. It was a lot of good players, Americans. Feels like I have been here for a long time, I have to admit. I know the site pretty well now, but I kind of enjoy it and it’s really nice to be in the final again.”
Garcia will play for the WTA 1000 title for the first time since Wuhan and Beijing in 2017. Even though she had to go through two qualifying rounds, her performance wasn’t out of the ordinary. During the grass swing, she won eight straight matches. She then won her second title of the year in Warsaw, beating world No. 1 Iga Swiatek to do so.
Coric’s Game and More
Since bad weather messed up the order of play, Borna Coric’s match with Cameron Norrie in the final four had to be moved to the Grandstand. With a 6-3, 6-4 win over No. 9 seed Cameron Norrie, the Croat added to an already fantastic week in which he beat No. 2 seed Rafael Nadal in the second round and No. 7 seed Felix Auger-Aliassime in the quarterfinals.
Coric’s run, on the other hand, might be even more surprising than Garcia’s. He had a protected ranking and four tour-level wins when he came into this tournament in 2022. In March of that year, he had been out for a year with a shoulder injury. He has more than doubled that with his performance in Ohio, which will put him back in the Top 50 by more than 100 spots.
“I knew I need to work probably three times more harder than I used to work, and that’s what I did,” Coric said. “For the last six months I was really focused. I kept my head down even when I was losing and when I was not playing very good tennis.”
Coric is about to play in his second Masters 1000 final (he was runner-up at Shanghai in 2018). If he wins on Sunday, he will be seeded at the US Open. First, he’ll have to beat No. 4 seed Stefanos Tsitsipas, who is also a big name. The Greek beat the number one player in the world, Daniil Medvedev, 7-6 (6), 3-6, 6-3. He saved a set point in the first tiebreaker to beat the current US Open champion for only the third time in 10 matches.