Before they met, Sun Xinran told reporters she had watched Gauff’s matches on TV and was excited to face her. Xinran had won the US Open girls’ title three weeks earlier and was playing the China Open on a wild card, her first tour-level event. At the China Open, she had beaten Eva Lys 6-1, 3-0 (Lys retired) and Cristina Bucsa 6-4, 7-5 to reach the third round. Gauff, speaking after her own second-round win on Saturday, had advice ready for her next opponent. Keep expectations modest, she said, because at 17 you will both fail and succeed. But their mutual respect was soon overshadowed by a controversial moment in the match that triggered a wave of online abuse directed at Gauff.

“Hey everyone, you can dislike me or disagree about what happened without being racist,” wrote Gauff on X. “The amount of racist comments/dms I’ve received in the last few hours is insane. Lastly, I’m not a cheater or a thief.”

The point at the center of it came late in the first set. Gauff was serving at 4-5 when electronic advertising boards beside the court flickered. Sun appeared poised to win the point when Gauff raised her hand to stop play. And after a video review, the chair umpire ordered the point to be replayed. The review request drew some boos from the crowd, as Gauff went on to win the replayed point and held for 5-5. She then took the set 7-5 and the second 6-1.

In another Instagram comment, Gauff wrote that players are told before matches they may keep playing and challenge afterward, and that she was weighing that while the point was live. She said Sun would have been entitled to ask for a replay, too, had Gauff lost the point, adding that she raised her hands only once she was sure the light had flickered a second time. “It was an unfortunate situation, but it is out of my control,” she wrote. She said she did not make the rules and called it odd to get hate for following them: “I think it’s weird I’m getting hate for following the rules”.

Meanwhile, Sun appeared emotional at the changeover, with Gauff adding that she apologized to Sun at the end of the match and that Sun “completely understood.” She called Sun an incredible talent and said she did not like seeing her so emotional, having been in that position herself.

Online abuse of players is a documented problem on tour. After the 2023 WTA Finals, Gauff said she deals with daily harassment that includes death threats, racism, and body shaming. A WTA and World Tennis report found that more than 12,000 social-media posts were categorized as abusive in 2025, including 3,726 classified as serious abuse involving violence, racism, and targeted threats.

They further found that just 9% of abusive accounts were responsible for 87% of abuse classified as “high concern” in 2025, while prolific offenders accounted for nearly half of all detected abuse.

And the abuse is increasingly being treated as a security issue rather than merely an unpleasant part of social media. In 2025, investigations identified 68 abusive accounts, while 35 accounts linked to 12 individuals were escalated to law-enforcement agencies. The scale of the monitoring effort itself reflects the steps the organisations are trying to take. The WTA and World Tennis’s current system covers more than 10,000 players and officials and uses AI alongside human analysts to assess content in 57 languages across major social platforms.

That said, Novak Djokovic’s China Open quarterfinal against Alexander Zverev featured a similar incident when Zverev requested a video review after losing a point. The review showed that an electronic advertising panel had changed during the rally, prompting the chair umpire to order the point replayed and Djokovic to object to the decision.

Gauff, though, will not have much time to dwell on these controversies as she gears up for her next match in Beijing. The American will have the added pressure as she is set to take on Elise Mertens next.