Coco Gauff will face Elena Rybakina in Wednesday's semifinals at the National Bank Open in Toronto, with the winner moving on to Thursday's championship. It is only the second meeting between the two, and the first time they have played each other in four years.
That alone gives the match weight, because Gauff leads the head-to-head 1-0 and the pair's last meeting came in the 2022 Toronto Round of 32, where Gauff won 4-6, 7-6, 7-6 after 2 hours and 50 minutes. For a matchup that has come around so rarely, the stakes are immediate: one more win and the tournament shifts from semifinal pressure to a title match on Thursday.
The National Bank Open in Toronto is now down to its final four, and Gauff-Rybakina sits at the center of the Wednesday schedule. The other semifinal sends Iga Swiatek against Elina Svitolina, with both matches set for Centre Court at 7 p.m. The doubles match on Grandstand is scheduled for 5 p.m., but the focus is on the singles draw and on whether Gauff can repeat a result that has not been tested since that long afternoon in 2022.
The odd part of the matchup is how little it has happened. A 1-0 edge on paper suggests one thing, but the fact that Gauff and Rybakina have met only twice in four years says something else: these are two top players who have spent much of that stretch moving through different sections of the draw. That leaves Wednesday's semifinal with the feel of a delayed test, and it is one that arrives just as both players have reached the point where a single break, a single tiebreak, can decide who keeps playing.
For Gauff, the task is simple to name and hard to do. Beat Rybakina again and she goes to Thursday's National Bank Open championship. Lose, and the rare rematch ends the same way it began, with a rivalry still too thin to explain and a result that will invite another long wait for the next one.
