Iga Swiatek rides the Coco Gauff roller coaster to “survive” in windy Cancun conditions

Once you have the service yips, you never know when they might crop up again. You could solve all of your technical problems, and not double fault for a year, but the possibility that they’ll return—likely at a highly inopportune moment—never completely leaves your head. Ask Maria Sharapova or Alexander Zverev. For all of their successes, their serves tended to abandon them just when they needed them most.

Ask Coco Gauff, too. Or maybe wait a little bit before you bring it up.

On Wednesday, when she was on the verge of leveling her WTA Finals match with Iga Swiatek at one-set all, the American suffered from a relapse of the yips. Serving at 5-4 in the second set, she began the game with a top-shelf half-volley winner that would have made John McEnroe proud. Gauff celebrated with a fist-pump, and Swiatek walked back to the baseline with her head down. A third set appeared to be in the works.

Instead, Gauff missed eight straight serves.

She sent them into the tape, into the bottom of the net, and over the service line. Seemingly out of nowhere, she lost all control of her swing. I say “seemingly” because we’ve seen this from Coco before. Two years ago, it looked as if her rise up the rankings might be seriously delayed by her propensity for double faults. But she worked hard to solve the problem, and this year even turned her first serve into a major weapon, and a big reason she won her first Grand Slam title at the US Open.

This time, though, the yips cost her. From 5-4, 15-0, she lost eight straight points. By the time she served again at 5-6, her lack of confidence in that shot had infected the others. At match point, Gauff drilled the easiest of overheads into the net to give Swiatek a 6-0, 7-5 win.

In Gauff’s defense, the wind, which had been swirling through the match, began to swirl harder late in the second set. Still, Swiatek managed her way through it.

“There’s no reason to overthink it,” Swiatek said of the conditions. “Just adjust to it, and that’s what I tried to do.

“I’m happy I could survive.”

Before Gauff’s service breakdown, the match had been a tale of two very different sets, and a tale of two very different levels from Coco. In the first, it was her forehand that collapsed; she missed a few early and quickly lost confidence in her entire game. In the second set, she fought through it, found some semblance of her range, and began to mix high topspin forehands with flat backhands, the way she did when she recorded her only win over Swiatek, in Cincinnati.

Then, just when Coco had righted the ship, it turned in the wrong direction again. Swiatek played well enough to notch her 22nd bagel set of the season, and ride the Gauff roller-coaster to a 2-0 record in Cancun.