Coco Gauff is keen to return to another sport during the off-season after getting reinspired by the Olympics.
The world No. 2 entered all three tennis events at Paris 2024 but walked away without a medal.
She’s now back in action at the Canadian Open but has been keeping up with the Olympics. After watching the other athletes, Gauff has already spoken to her dad about trying her old sport.
The 20-year-old was a track athlete during her time in school but ultimately went with tennis and it paid off – she made her Wimbledon debut aged 15 and won her first Grand Slam title last year. But the Olympic Games have given Gauff some FOMO as she continues to follow the track events from afar.
Asked whether she ever wondered what would have happened if she stuck with her other sport, the US Open champion said: “Yeah, I actually do, and, I mean, I do feel like I could have been, I don’t know if I would have been as good as I was in tennis in track, but I strongly feel like if I would have trained I could have been an Olympian.
“Track is the only sport I would say that in just because I did do well in middle school like never training, I didn’t go to one track practice, and I won all my races except two, and both were against the same girl and she was in 8th grade.”
Gauff isn’t the only one who can see herself racing at the Olympics. Her mum Candi, a former college athlete, and 100m gold medallist Noah Lyles could see her potential on track. “Yeah, my mom said too, she ran track at Florida State, so she was like, I think if, you know, I think 400 would have been my race,” the American continued.
“Noah Lyles said he saw me as like a 400 hurdler, but I’m like kind of scared of hurdlers, so, yeah, I don’t think I would have been like that, but definitely 400 or longer would have been my thing.”
Given that she barely practised during her track days in middle school, Gauff now wants to enter a race during the tennis off-season at the end of the year to see what she can do. She added: “I do wish that, sometimes I’m like, what could have happened. I even talked to my dad about putting me in some local track meets in the off-season, just for the fun of it, just to see where I could go.
“I think I do want to do that. I’d do, maybe one off-season, just run a race, it doesn’t hurt, I wouldn’t train much for it, but just to see what my time would be would be pretty cool. I never ran out of blocks before so I guess I would have to learn how to do that.”
Content Source: www.express.co.uk