MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Coco Gauff smashed her racket into the concrete floor once for every time she dropped serve, and another one for good measure, after her Australian Open quarterfinal loss to Elina Svitolina on Tuesday.
The third-seeded Gauff, a two-time major winner, struggled with her serve and recorded five double-faults in the first set, when she was broken four times.
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Elina Svitolina of Ukraine celebrates after defeating Coco Gauff of the U.S. in their quarterfinal match at the Australian Open tennis championship in Melbourne, Australia, Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2026.(AP Photo/Dita Alangkara)
Coco Gauff of the U.S. runs into the net during her quarterfinal against Elina Svitolina of Ukraine at the Australian Open tennis championship in Melbourne, Australia, Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2026. (AP Photo/Dita Alangkara)
Coco Gauff of the U.S. reacts during her quarterfinal match against Elina Svitolina of Ukraine during their quarterfinal match at the Australian Open tennis championship in Melbourne, Australia, Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2026. (AP Photo/Dita Alangkara)
Coco Gauff of the U.S. walks from the court following her quarterfinal loss to Elina Svitolina of Ukraine at the Australian Open tennis championship in Melbourne, Australia, Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2026. (AP Photo/Dita Alangkara)
Coco Gauff of the U.S. reacts during her quarterfinal match against Elina Svitolina of Ukraine during their quarterfinal match at the Australian Open tennis championship in Melbourne, Australia, Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2026. (AP Photo/Dita Alangkara)
There were two more service breaks in the second set and, once the match was over — in 59 minutes — Gauff stayed composed as she left the center court and tried to find somewhere quiet to vent her frustrations.
Turns out, there's pretty much no place in Rod Laver Arena except for the locker rooms that is beyond the scope of the cameras. So, the seven times she pounded her racket into a concrete ramp were far from a private moment following her 6-1, 6-2 defeat.
“Certain moments — the same thing happened to Aryna (Sabalenka) after I played her in the final of the U.S. Open — I feel like they don’t need to broadcast,” Gauff said in her post-match news conference. “I tried to go somewhere where I thought there wasn’t a camera because I don’t necessarily like breaking rackets.
“I broke one racket (at the) French Open, I think, and I said I would never do it again on court because I don’t feel like that’s a good representation. So, yeah, maybe some conversations can be had.”
Gauff hit just three clean winners across 15 games, made 26 unforced errors and won 2 of 11 points on her second serve. She got 74% of her first serves into play, but only won 41% of those points.
It was an usually bad day for a player who made her Grand Slam debut at 15 and won her first major, the 2023 U.S. Open, at 19. She's still only 21.
Gauff said she felt it was better to shatter a racket than to take out any frustrations on her support team.
“They’re good people. They don’t deserve that, and I know I’m emotional,” Gauff said. “So, yeah, I just took the minute to go and do that.
“I don’t think it’s a bad thing. Like I said, I don’t try to do it on court in front of kids and things like that, but I do know I need to let out that emotion.”
Elina Svitolina of Ukraine celebrates after defeating Coco Gauff of the U.S. in their quarterfinal match at the Australian Open tennis championship in Melbourne, Australia, Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2026.(AP Photo/Dita Alangkara)
Coco Gauff of the U.S. runs into the net during her quarterfinal against Elina Svitolina of Ukraine at the Australian Open tennis championship in Melbourne, Australia, Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2026. (AP Photo/Dita Alangkara)
Coco Gauff of the U.S. reacts during her quarterfinal match against Elina Svitolina of Ukraine during their quarterfinal match at the Australian Open tennis championship in Melbourne, Australia, Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2026. (AP Photo/Dita Alangkara)
Coco Gauff of the U.S. walks from the court following her quarterfinal loss to Elina Svitolina of Ukraine at the Australian Open tennis championship in Melbourne, Australia, Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2026. (AP Photo/Dita Alangkara)
Coco Gauff of the U.S. reacts during her quarterfinal match against Elina Svitolina of Ukraine during their quarterfinal match at the Australian Open tennis championship in Melbourne, Australia, Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2026. (AP Photo/Dita Alangkara)
WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Candles flickered at dawn Tuesday at the vast Holocaust memorial in Berlin as people across Europe and beyond paused to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day, reflecting on Nazi Germany's murder of millions of people and its attempt to completely wipe out Jewish life on the continent.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day is observed across the world on Jan. 27, the anniversary of the liberation by Soviet forces of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious of the Nazi German death camps. The U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution in 2005 establishing the day as an annual commemoration.
At the memorial site of Auschwitz, located in a part of southern Poland which was under German occupation during World War II, former prisoners laid flowers and wreaths at a wall where German forces murdered thousands of people, most of them Poles. Later in the day Poland's President Karol Nawrocki will join survivors for a remembrance ceremony at Birkenau, the vast site nearby where Jews were transported from across Europe to be exterminated in gas chambers.
Nazi German forces murdered some 1.1 million people at the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, most of them Jews, but Poles, Roma and others were also killed there.
Commemorations on the anniversary of Auschwitz's liberation by the Red Army on Jan. 27, 1945, were taking place across Europe.
Candles burned and white roses were placed at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a field of 2,700 gray concrete slabs near the Brandenburg Gate in the heart of Berlin, which honors the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, and stands as a powerful symbol of Germany's remorse.
In the Czech Republic, a candlelight march is planned for the evening in Terezin at the site of the former Nazi concentration camp Theresienstadt. Thousands of Jews died there or were sent from there to Auschwitz and other death camps.
On Sunday, the Netherlands marked its National Holocaust Memorial day with a silent march through Amsterdam’s historic Jewish quarter to a memorial to Auschwitz victims. “Bergen-Belsen, Sobibor, Auschwitz — they are unprecedented and still incomprehensible examples of what intolerance, hatred, and racism can lead to,” Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema told hundreds at the somber event.
Israel marks its Holocaust Remembrance Day on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943, which stresses Jewish resistance to the Nazi terror.
As they look back, many leaders also reflected on the hatred in today's world.
The European Union’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, warned that the world is seeing the highest levels of anti-Semitism since the Holocaust and that some of the threats are now “taking new and disturbing forms.”
Kallas, the EU foreign policy chief, underlined the misuse “of AI-generated content to blur the line between fact and fiction, distort historical truth, and undermine our collective memory.”
Czech President Petr Pavel said the day is "a call to reflect on the past and the responsibility we have as a society, but especially as individuals, in the contemporary world. Unfortunately, even today there are people who trivialize the hateful Nazi ideology, or even sympathize with it.”
There are an estimated 196,600 Jewish Holocaust survivors still alive globally, down from the 220,000 survivors estimated to be alive a year earlier, according to information published last week by the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. Nearly all of them — some 97% — are “child survivors” who were born 1928 and later, the group said.
Though the world's community of survivors shrinks with time, some are still telling their stories for the first time after all these years.
An annual gathering took place at the upper house of Czech Parliament with Holocaust survivors. Pavel Jelinek, a 90-year-old survivor from the city of Liberec — a Czech city with a prewar Jewish population of 1,350 — said he was now the last living of the 37 Jews who returned to the city after the war.
Jelinek told those gathered that his motto has been: “The whole world is one narrow bridge, and what matters is not to be afraid at all.”
Associated Press writers Karel Janicek in Prague, Lorne Cook in Brussels and Mike Corder in Amsterdam contributed to this report.
Holocaust survivor Stanislaw Zalewski walks in the Auschwitz Nazi death camp museum during a ceremony marking the 81th anniversary of the camp's liberation in Oswiecim, Poland, Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2026. (AP Photo/Beata Zawrzel)
A man walks through the snow covered Holocaust memorial on the International Holocaust Memorial Day in Berlin, Germany, Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2026. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)
A Jewish man attends a ceremony commemorating the extermination of the Jewish people and their deportation to Nazi concentration camps on Holocaust Remembrance Day, at the Monumental Cemetery, in Turin, Italy, Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2026. (Fabio Ferrari/LaPresse via AP)
Holocaust survivor Stanislaw Zalewski walks along a wall in the Auschwitz Nazi death camp museum during a ceremony marking the 81th anniversary of the camp's liberation in Oswiecim, Poland, Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2026. (AP Photo/Beata Zawrzel)
Candles placed in front of a concrete slab of the Holocaust memorial to mark the International Holocaust Memorial Day in Berlin, Germany, Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2026. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)
