A Chair Umpire Ordered the Point Replayed. Coco Gauff Is the One Getting the Racist Messages, and Tennis Already Knows Where Most of Them Come From

Late in the first set in Beijing on Monday, the electronic advertising boards around the court flickered. Sun Xinran was about to put away a winner. Coco Gauff raised her hand and stopped the rally. The chair umpire went to video review and ordered the point replayed. Gauff won the replayed point, then the set, then the match, 7-5 and 6-1, and advanced to the fourth round.

By Tuesday Gauff was on X writing this: "The amount of racist comments/dms I've received in the last few hours is insane." And this: "I'm not a cheater or a thief." And this: "Hey everyone, you can dislike me or disagree about what happened without being racist."

Note what happened in the middle of that sequence. A player made a request the rules allow. An official reviewed it and made a ruling. The official decided; the player received the abuse. That gap is the whole subject, and tennis has three years of data on it.

The number the tour publishes about itself

On July 16 the WTA and World Tennis released their second annual report on online abuse, built on Signify Group's Threat Matrix service, which has covered the tours since January 2024. In 2025 the programme analysed more than 1.2 million posts and comments across X, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Facebook, in 57 languages, on behalf of more than 10,000 players and officials. It classified more than 12,000 of those posts as abusive, up from roughly 8,000 the year before. It classified 3,726 as serious abuse — violent, sexual, racist or directly threatening.

Then the finding that should be the headline every time this happens and never is. Of the verified abuse, 42 per cent was gambling-related. Of the serious abuse, 59 per cent was. Both figures rose about two points from 2024.

This is not a guess from a press officer. It is the tour's own annual accounting, and it says that the majority of the worst thing that happens to professional tennis players online is produced by people with money on the match.

The rest of the report is a portrait of how concentrated it is. Nine per cent of abusive accounts generated 87 per cent of the high-concern abuse. Twenty-six prolific accounts, since removed, were responsible for 21 per cent of all abuse detected. Sixty-eight accounts were fully or partially identified. Thirty-five were escalated to law enforcement, traced to twelve individuals. Eighty-nine per cent of the accounts behind serious abuse in 2024 did not come back in 2025, which the WTA reasonably counts as progress.

And at the end of the distribution, the part that removes any remaining ambiguity about motive: two players, the Italian Lucrezia Stefanini and the Hungarian Panna Udvardy, received threats over WhatsApp demanding that they lose. The messages contained gun imagery, their family members' details and their addresses.

Why in-play markets changed the arithmetic

Angry fans are not new. A continuously priced market on the next point is new.

Live betting means that at any instant during a match there is a population of people whose money is on something more granular than the result — this game, this service break, the total number of games in the set. A replayed point in the eleventh game of a first set is, to that population, a direct cash event. It is not a controversy they are reading about afterwards. It is a debit, in real time, caused by a visible person.

That is the mechanism that turns a rules dispute into thousands of direct messages inside a few hours, and it is also why the abuse attached to Gauff rather than to the umpire. A chair umpire does not have an Instagram account with millions of followers. The market needs somewhere to put the loss, and it puts it on whoever can be reached.

The players have adapted the way people adapt to weather. Jessica Pegula, ranked third, turns comments off during competition. Leylah Fernandez has described the futility plainly: "you can't find them." Gauff herself has said X is the worst of the platforms and that she uses the block function strategically. These are reasonable coping strategies and they are also an admission that nobody expects the problem to be solved.

The strongest case against blaming betting, taken seriously

Three objections, and they all have force.

First, the 42 and 59 per cent figures are classifications, not confessions. Signify's analysts infer that abuse is gambling-related from its content — references to slips, odds, losses, accusations of fixing. Nobody is matching posts to settled wagers at a sportsbook. The real share could be meaningfully lower or higher, and anyone citing those numbers as hard measurement, including us, should say that out loud.

Second, this particular case has dynamics that have nothing to do with a bet slip. A Black American was playing a 16-year-old Chinese wild card in Beijing in front of her home crowd. Racist abuse arriving in that situation has sources older and uglier than in-play markets, and attributing it all to gambling would be a way of not looking at the simpler explanation.

Third, the tour is not a disinterested narrator. Tennis takes money from betting operators and sells official data into betting markets. A report that locates the problem in gamblers rather than in the sport's own commercial relationships is, at minimum, a convenient finding.

We accept all three and the structural point survives them. You do not need the 59 per cent to be exactly right; you need it to be roughly right, and no competing explanation accounts for why abuse spikes on refereeing decisions and line calls rather than on bad losses. The Stefanini and Udvardy threats are not ambiguous in the slightest — the demand was that they lose. And the third objection is an argument for more disclosure, not for less attribution: a sport that profits from the betting market has a heavier obligation to police its externalities, not a lighter one.

What would actually move it

Not more measurement. The measurement works — 66 per cent of serious abuse removed, 89 per cent of offenders not returning, twelve individuals identified from thirty-five accounts. Those are real numbers from a real programme and it has not stopped the thing it measures, because its only instrument is asking a platform to delete a post after it has arrived.

The operators are the ones with the lever nobody is pulling. A sportsbook knows exactly who had money on Gauff-Sun at 5-5 in the first set. It has a verified identity, a payment method and a terms-of-service relationship with every one of them. No tennis body can obtain any of that. If an account that sent a racist message after a replayed point were closed by the book it was betting with, the deterrent would be immediate and personal in a way a platform takedown never is. Not one major operator does this, and none has been asked to in public by a tour.

We should be straightforward about our position in this. TrueEdge builds odds tools and earns affiliate commissions from licensed sportsbooks, which means we are paid by the industry that the WTA's own data identifies as the source of most serious abuse against its players. That is an uncomfortable thing to publish and it is the reason to publish it.

Editor's note: TrueEdge builds odds and pricing tools and earns affiliate commissions from licensed sportsbooks. This piece argues for a conduct obligation on those same operators. Readers should weigh that.