"Honestly, I didn't realize I was about to play her, It all felt like a dream": Gauff looks back on landmark Venus Williams Wimbledon win

Coco Gauff's first major win in tennis was agaisnt Venus Williams and she remembered that match and how it felt playing it in a recent inteview.

Gauff has been an established player for a while yet it all started at Wimbledon a few years ago. She was a teenager who was about to face a player she looked up to growing up and it was nerve-wracking. Gauff remembered the match in a recent interview explaining how she tried her best to ignore the fact that she was playing Venus:

"Honestly, I didn't realize I was about to play her. It all felt like a dream until we were walking through the corridor and they showed pictures of past champions, and you see her name and her picture up there a couple of times because she's won it a lot. That's when I was like, 'Wow, this is really about to happen."

It was a way for Gauff to protect herself from the magnitude of the moment and it's something that she kept up for the entirety of the match. She didn't realise what happened until after the match finished:

The whole match, I never looked at the scoreboard because I just didn't want my mind to know that I was playing Venus Williams. I just wanted my mind to know I was playing some unknown figure and I think really into the match points when I realized, 'Oh my gosh, I just beat Venus Williams.'

She also revealed how the post-match handshake looked:

"It was such a thrill. I remember my hand was shaking. People were saying how long I shook her hand. It didn't feel that long to me, but when I look back, it was pretty long. I literally grabbed her hand."