Coco Gauff was shocked at how a lot tinier the duplicate trophy she bought to maintain after profitable this 12 months’s French Open was than the trophy she posed with on court docket at Roland-Garros for all of the world to see. She even did a TikTok concerning the discrepancy, drawing greater than 2 million views.
Why was Gauff so bowled over by what she known as the “miniature model”?
“I truthfully didn’t know the scale it was going to be. … I do know you by no means actually take the unique, however once I gained the U.S. Open, they gave me the identical measurement (trophy), with my title engraved on it,” Gauff informed The Related Press. “So I simply assumed that Roland Garros can be the identical.”
Truly, it seems Gauff’s 2023 championship on the U.S. Open marked the primary time the ladies’s singles winner in New York was given a silver cup considerably bigger than the one that’s used within the postmatch ceremony. Her duplicate {hardware} is nineteen 1/2 inches tall, the identical as each the unique and memento males’s trophies — and seven 1/2 inches greater than the unique ladies’s trophy.
That one, like the unique males’s, is displayed throughout the match in a locked glass field close to the place gamers enter the occasion’s predominant area and will probably be briefly handed to, then taken away from, whoever wins the ladies’s closing in Arthur Ashe Stadium this Saturday.
From 1987, when the custom of offering keepsakes at Flushing Meadows started, till two years in the past, the feminine champion took dwelling a 12-inch-tall copy. However the U.S. Tennis Affiliation requested Tiffany & Co. to create replicas for the ladies to match the scale of what the boys are allowed to maintain. That change coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the match’s 1973 transfer to pay equal prize cash to ladies and men at then-player Billie Jean King’s urging.
“Equality is in our DNA right here on the USTA Billie Jean King Nationwide Tennis Middle. All the pieces we do, we’re very intentional about equality … and we needed to do the identical because it pertains to the champion’s trophies,” U.S. Open match director Stacey Allaster mentioned in an interview.
“We had a really strong dialog: Ought to we recreate a brand new ladies’s singles champion’s trophy? Ultimately, we made the choice to stick with historical past and to not change the trophy itself, however to make sure that the duplicate trophy was of the identical measurement as the boys’s,” mentioned Allaster, who’s the chief government {of professional} tennis on the USTA. “Trophies are so iconic to the historical past of this championships, and we simply didn’t really feel it was the suitable factor to maneuver away from that historical past, however … (we needed) to have the ability to award the singles champions the identical sizes.”
King wasn’t conscious of the change till the AP requested her about it.
“I didn’t know they did that. It’s incredible. It’s equal,” King mentioned. “It sends very optimistic messaging that we matter simply as a lot. Our trophy’s simply as massive.”
Howard Fendrich has been the AP’s tennis author since 2002. Discover his tales right here: https://apnews.com/creator/howard-fendrich. Extra AP tennis: https://apnews.com/hub/tennis
—Howard Fendrich, AP Tennis Author
