Coco Gauff wins Madrid match after getting sick on court: "I don't know how I got through it"

Coco Gauff didn't just overcome Sorana Cirstea in the third round of the Mutua Madrid Open on Sunday. The defending Roland Garros champion also fought through an illness that saw her get sick on the court.

Looking sluggish in her second match against Cirstea in less than a month—Gauff also beat her in three sets in the third round at the Miami Open—Gauff trailed Cirstea at one stage by a set and a break. At 4-4 in set two, after breaking Cirstea's serve, Gauff sprinted to the side of the court to get sick, and also received a medical timeout where a tournament doctor checked her vitals.

From there, she won nine of the last 11 games for a 4-6, 7-5, 6-1 victory.

"I was just trying to finish the match, and have one point turn into another," Gauff later said in her on-court interview after the two hour, 21-minute match. "I'm just going to try to push through ... It was a weird feeling today. I don't know how I got through it."

Gauff, who retired from a match against Alexandra Eala at the BNP Paribas Open last month with an arm injury, just the second mid-match retirement of her career, said she wanted to do everything she could to avoid pulling the plug from another match in the middle of it.

"When I actually threw up on the court, that was like a little bit embarrassing," Gauff later told reporters, as per the WTA website. "Then after that first game and the second, I was like that took everything out of me. I'm someone who doesn't like to pull out [of matches]. I don't like to do that unless I really feel like I have no other options.

"So the plan was to always just try to finish, even if it ended up with me, just playing just to get through it."

Illness has been one of the subplots of the first combined ATP and WTA 1000 clay-court event of the spring, with four players forced out of the event due to various sicknesses. Madison Keys and Marin Cilic both gave their second-round opponents walkovers, with the latter citing food poisoning. 2022 Madrid champion Iga Swiatek, meanwhile, retired from her match against Ann Li on Saturday due to also feeling unwell.

“I'm sure I'll be fine in a couple of days, but I had zero energy," Swiatek said. "I just felt really bad physically and yesterday, even worse. So I thought maybe today it's gonna be better, but maybe it was, but not enough to play a match."

"The symptoms are not something you want to hear about," she added.

Gauff will next face No. 13 seed Linda Noskova, who moved through to the Round of 16 without hitting a ball because No. 20 seed Liudmila Samsonova also withdrew.