Coco Gauff and Aryna Sabalenka perform TikTok dance routine on Wimbledon's Centre Court as top seeds show there are no hard feelings after fall-out from French Open final
There was no sign of any lingering tension between Coco Gauff and Aryna Sabalenka as the two top seeds danced together on Wimbledon 's Centre Court in a light-hearted TikTok routine ahead of this year's Championships.
Three weeks after Gauff beat Sabalenka in the French Open final, the pair took to the hallowed grass on Friday for a relaxed practice session that ended with them grooving to C+C Music Factory's Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now).
Sabalenka, the No 1 seed in the women's singles at SW19, posted the clip to Instagram, writing: 'TikTok dances always had a way of bringing people together.'
Gauff, who is seeded second, also shared a video of the pair lip-syncing outside Centre Court, captioning it: 'OK guys, we're back. Did you miss us? Cause we missed you.'
She added a message to fans to confirm the hatchet had been buried, stating: 'The olive branch was extended and accepted! We're good so you guys should be too.'
Their playful display comes after a frostier exchange following the Roland Garros final on June 7, when Sabalenka was criticised for saying Gauff won 'not because she played incredible; just because I made all of those mistakes from… easy balls.'
Gauff responded at the time by saying she didn't feel the remarks were fair, noting: 'The way Aryna was playing the last few weeks, she was the favourite to win… I think I got the hardest matchup just if you go off stats alone.'
View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Aryna Sabalenka (@arynasabalenka)
Sabalenka later admitted her post-match comments were 'unprofessional' and revealed she had reached out to apologise privately.
'I absolutely regret what I said back then. We all make mistakes. I'm just a human being who's still learning in life,' she said.
'I think we all have those days when we lose control. The difference with me is the world is watching.'
Any doubt over the state of their relationship appears to have been erased, with the TikTok videos showing smiles, laughter and synchronised dance moves from two of the biggest stars in women's tennis.
Sabalenka opened her Wimbledon campaign with a 6-1, 7-5 win over Canada's Carson Branstine on Court 1 on Monday.
Gauff will begin her tournament on Tuesday on Centre Court against Ukraine's Dayana Yastremska.
Due to their seedings, the earliest Gauff and Sabalenka can face each other at Wimbledon is in the final on July 12 — and Sabalenka has hinted that if she wins, she is ready to celebrate in style.
'If I win the title, of course I'm going to do the dance,' she told Mail Sport last week. 'But it would be more like a TikTok dance — the first one, we're going to create a new tradition!'
Sabalenka, who has a tiger tattoo on her left forearm as a reminder to 'fight like a tiger', admitted she has had to learn to manage her fiery on-court persona, saying: 'When I first came on tour, everyone was teaching me to be quiet, not show your emotions… But I found it is much easier when I let those negative emotions go — scream at my team, let it out.'
She added: 'Sometimes I go too much in these negative emotions, which is also not right. So we have to balance it.'
The Belarusian star has unfinished business at Wimbledon, having reached the semi-finals in 2021 and 2023. She withdraw from last year's tournament due to an shoulder injury, having also missed the 2022 Championships because of the ban on Russian and Belarusian players following the invasion of Ukraine.
'Now I'm here at Wimbledon I feel like I'm a different person. I'm super excited to compete — you appreciate that opportunity much more when it has been taken away,' she said.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Glasgow Times
25 minutes ago
- Glasgow Times
Wimbledon residents ‘not even allowed plumbers' during tournament
Mikael Grut, 92, a former civil servant who suffers from Parkinson's disease and kyphosis, lives in Burghley House, a residential block overlooking the All England Club. During the Championships, access to his building is restricted by two vehicle checkpoints, one operated by Merton Council and the other by tournament organisers. 'There are times when we need someone at the drop of a hat, it complicates life,' he said. 'They even told us if we need a plumber, to get it done before the tennis.' Mr Grut said all guests must be registered in advance, with residents emailing the estate office so letters can be physically posted on their behalf. 'I can't get to the post office, so I have to email them and ask them to send it for me,' he said. His carer, Conchita del Campo, 71, said: 'It's like Brazil, you've got gated communities. 'I had to call ahead, and Mikael had to submit my car details so I could get through the barriers.' 'It's like being in lockdown again,' Mr Grut added. 'There are two checkpoints, and someone is always there.' Mikael Grut, 92 (Joseph Hadden/PA) Despite the building being used for Wimbledon filming from its top floor, residents are not offered tickets to the tournament. 'We should charge them,' Ms del Campo joked. Mr Grut, who has three children, eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren, said: 'There's some pride in living somewhere famous, people say, 'Oh, you come from Wimbledon'. 'But it's not easy during the tennis.' Merton Council and Wimbledon have been contacted for comment.
Spectator
35 minutes ago
- Spectator
Adam Curtis can see your future
Adam Curtis used to make TikToks but doesn't want to talk about them. 'I did quite a lot of TikTok, privately,' he says, 'just under another name. They're probably out there somewhere…' His head rests in his hand and his elbow on the chair next to him, the two of us among pink flowers at the kitchen table in the Soho townhouse where he works. He looks at me and repeats: 'They're private.' For 30 years Curtis has been making documentaries for the BBC about how Britain became a sad place, or, in his own words: 'What happened after the Cold War, mixed in with a deeper sense of… I think melancholy. A sense we were once powerful.' Shifty is his new film. Outwardly the five episodes chart the breakdown of society's collective structures from Margaret Thatcher to Tony Blair. Really they are Curtis's attempt at tracing the origins of a strange emotion that he says has become general in Britain, a feeling that 'there is a big thing going on behind the surface'. 'I think there's something new going on inside people's heads and no one has got the language to describe it,' he tells me. It is this emotion, Curtis believes, that caused 'Leave' to win the Brexit referendum and explains Reform's popularity. He is describing a sort of revolutionary feeling, I think. If you go back and watch previous Curtis documentaries, flick between them, do an Adam Curtis to Adam Curtis, you realise that they mash together quite neatly, and that his work has a single ambition: to hold this anxious spirit to the sun, twirl it around in his hand and observe it from different angles. So Shifty is an origin story. Curtis says that during the 1980s and 1990s we privatised and financed our way into nasty self-centredness. People felt unmoored and politicians became unable to hold communities together. Curtis leaves it to the viewer to draw the easy line to today's politics. In one of the final scenes in the series, Peter Mandelson visits the Millennium Dome, which is then under construction. 'It's marvellous, absolutely marvellous,' he tells Tony Blair on a phone call. 'You'll think it's incredible, believe me. There's a zone with lots of emblems of Britain in it. I suddenly saw a photograph of a plate of toad-in-the-hole. I loved toad-in-the-hole when I was little!' The Blair government, and every government since, keeps giving us more toad-in-the-hole. Curtis's films are always about the past because he, like the politicians he describes, is unable to define the present. 'There are certain aspects of modern power that you cannot illustrate,' he says. 'And they make me cry, sometimes literally. I'm scrabbling for shots. I'll tell you what they are. They're computers. They govern our lives, but nothing happens. And that expands to things like HR because that's just men and women in glass offices doing keystrokes which will govern your life and destroy your life or whatever. But there's nothing there. Finance. I've gone mad sometimes looking for shots. The normal solution for a television journalist is to have a reporter gazing at a screen with the glow on their face musing to themselves. And I would not do that. You have to find another way.' 'This really gets me,' he continues. 'I feel like so much of the modern world is just not being recorded, got at.' I ask if he really cries about it. 'Out of frustration, yeah. Just like… 'Oh for fuck's sake! How do I illustrate this?' I can't do another shot of a server farm. I just can't.' Curtis says that as 'modern power' has become unillustratable, so has 'the self'. He says that in the BBC archive footage, somewhere in 1997 or 1998, people start to speak and carry themselves in unnatural ways when they know they are in front of a camera. This is before social media and reality television. He can't explain it. We also, obviously, spend a decreasing amount of time interacting with the physical world. 'Isn't that fascinating?' Curtis says. 'In the age where people are exposing themselves more and more and more and more, it's… [he's referring to 'the self'] not there.' I am aware that all of this talk of emotions and feelings and stories and the self sounds mysterious and perhaps overthought, but something in it is true when it comes from Curtis. 'You know that's not right, you know it from yourself,' he will say in conversation. Curtis used to narrate his documentaries, but doesn't anymore. His voice actually got deeper with every new series, until it vanished completely in his 2022 film Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone, which is about the end of the Soviet Union. In his films and in person Curtis does not make arguments, he summons moods. He also refuses to use the word 'vibe'. A still from TraumaZone (Adam Curtis / BBC) 'Dominic Cummings got in touch with me after my Russia thing,' Curtis says. 'He was in Russia during that time. I just found him very funny. I like his snark, and I like the fact that he realises that the bubble is not good. I respect him for that.' I ask whether politicians have asked him to help them portray their vision of the country to the population. He says he has been contacted by politicians, and that they 'are always after something', but that 'no one has ever asked me to help them.' People speculate about Curtis's own politics, and he makes it very clear to me that he is not a liberal. 'Never trust a liberal,' he says. 'The one thing the patrician liberals can't examine is themselves. They really cannot do it. I find it absolutely astonishing. After Brexit, they didn't examine their role in it. They did not examine any role they might have played.' Curtis says his views on politics are born out of north Kent, where he comes from. 'It's… What's the word… Independent,' he says. 'That's the polite way of putting it.' Can you explain that a little more, I ask. 'No,' he replies. Fair enough. 'I challenge anyone to say what my politics are,' he says later, 'because quite frankly I haven't got any. I'm a completely modern creature, like you I'm sure, and a lot of my friends. I react to events as they come along. You are aware that power is unequal and you shouldn't cry about that fact.' 'We might be living through a revolution, but we don't know it' We go to the study where Curtis edits. There is some Lana Del Rey merch, two monitors and a mess of hard-drives. (The townhouse is not his, by the way. It is owned by a bohemian lady. She lets him work here.) 'Every now and then, I wonder whether it's going to crash,' he says, nodding at the mess. 'Well, I mean, it does crash… But it's going to properly crash. And then I'm fucked.' He says that the hard part of his job is coming up with 'the idea and the stories'. It took him about nine months to come up with the introduction to Bitter Lake, which is the best sequence of any of his films, and ten minutes to make it. Curtis finds editing is easy and satisfying, and does it late at night. 'There's a whole tradition, and it goes so deep, of editors, probably because they're not really in control and they want their bit of control, they go: 'We've got to cut a frame off… here'. I know that no one notices that. What they really notice is whether it's drawing them in, whether they're going along with you for the ride.' Because he edits his documentaries himself, he costs the BBC very little. Shifty cost £17,500 to make. Curtis's next documentary might be about America, he says, but it could also be about 'living in a society where a lot of things look normal but actually behind them they're not.' We are currently, he says, 'in a sort of cosplay of everything. And behind it, there's this seething mass.' 'We might be living through a revolution, but we don't know it because it's happening already inside millions of people's heads. It'll suddenly burst through to us: 'OH MY FUCK!''
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Wimbledon diary: strawberry sandwiches, pricey rackets and Oliver Tarvet's expenses
'Where are the strawberries and cream?' was among the more unexpected questions for one of Wimbledon's army of volunteer stewards as the crowd streamed through the gates on Monday morning, given that the answer is 'absolutely everywhere you look'. It was a different story, though, at the local branch of Marks & Spencer, where 300 packs of the chain's specially commissioned strawberry & crème sandwich, a staple food for influencers on Instagram and TikTok in recent days, ran out shortly after 9am. A sample did make it into the media room, however, and while strawberries 'paired with whipped cream cheese on sweetened bread' might sound like the losing team's product idea on week two of The Apprentice, it has to be said … it's very edible. There was an air of genteel bedlam in the main Wimbledon shop as the first wave of merch-hungry tennis fans poured through the doors in search of SW19-branded booty. The demand for hats and towels was, not surprisingly, rather stronger than that for sweatshirts and hoodies, and no one at all seemed inclined to lug around one of the giant tennis rackets – designed to be hung on the wall, apparently – that are the most expensive single items in the shop at £600 a pop. And why would you, when you can get a self-inflating cushion – a genuine masterpiece of cutting-edge design that does exactly what it promises to do – for £582 less? Wimbledon's post-match media conferences can tend towards the formulaic – in the post-Nick Kyrgios era, at any rate – but there was an unusual twist in Oliver Tarvet's debrief after his excellent opening-day win against Leandro Riedi, as a 30-second chat about the match itself gave way to an in-depth discussion of the US collegiate system's rule limiting an athlete's annual earnings to $10,000 (£7,300). Tarvet, who is at San Diego University, is guaranteed at least £99,000 for reaching the second round and will now aim to spend as much of it as possible to get below the limit. 'I will try and do everything I can to make that work out and to find X amount of expenses so I'm under $10,000 of profit,' he said. 'I've got to find £60k, £70k of expenses. Tennis is an expensive sport so, hopefully I can make that happen. Just pay my coaches a little bit extra, I don't know. We'll figure something out. Fly business class. No, I keep humble, but yeah, really try to make that happen.' One of the more persistent – if understandable – annual breaches of Wimbledon protocol appears to have been consigned to history (along with the line judges) at this year's tournament: the running-while-looking-like-you're-not dash from gate three to the kiosk selling returns from the show courts as soon as the gates open at 10am. The simple solution – so simple that you can only wonder why it did not happen years ago – was to move the kiosk from its old spot by the Garden Café, on the far boundary of the site, to a new location … right next to gate three. 'We had to get lots of stewards in to try to get people to stop running,' an official mused while watching the new system working flawlessly on Monday. 'It wasn't very Wimbledon.' Sign up to The Recap The best of our sports journalism from the past seven days and a heads-up on the weekend's action after newsletter promotion Tennis-goers at Wimbledon are used to spending a fair part of their day looking nervously skywards but, for one day at least, players and punters alike were hoping for a cloud or two to offer some blessed respite from the 30C heat. Keeping cool was a constant challenge and one to which Daniil Medvedev, the No 9 seed, epically failed to rise. His rackets paid a heavy price for his surprise defeat by Benjamin Bonzi, as Medvedev took out his rage on both his chair and his bag, though he was more philosophical in the media room. 'Physically, it was not easy,' he said. 'To make a winner against him today, I had to make like, three great shots in the corner. I will never say he won because of the heat, but the heat is not easy to play. I do think, if you ask him, probably he was not enjoying the heat either.'
