The United States reached into its past in naming its male Olympic opening ceremonies flag bearer, selecting on Monday LeBron James, 39, for the honor: the two-time Olympic gold medalist got the nod as a sort of fitting lifetime achievement award.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]For its female flag bearer, Team USA looked to the future: the U.S. announced on Wednesday that tennis star Coco Gauff, 20, the defending U.S. Open champion, will do the honors on the Seine on Friday night. She’ll be the youngest American Opening Ceremonies flag bearer in history.
Gauff becomes the first tennis player to be selected as Opening ceremonies flag bearer, an honor chosen by fellow Olympic athletes and/or team captains. She’ll be the third Black woman to wave the stars and stripes at a Summer Olympics opening ceremony, following Evelyn Ashford in Seoul 1988 and Dawn Staley in Athens in 2004.
While many current tennis stars are skipping the Olympics, due to the extra workload—Americans Ben Shelton and Frances Tiafoe among them—Gauff has been looking forward to Paris, and her Olympic debut, for some time. “I get goosebumps representing my country,” Gauff told TIME back in March, sitting at the public courts she grew up playing on in Delray Beach, Fla. “I want to win a gold so bad.” A COVID diagnosis forced Gauff to miss the Tokyo Olympics in 2021.
Gauff is entered into three events: women’s singles, women’s doubles, and mixed doubles. Olympic tennis will take place on the clay courts of Roland Garros, home of the French Open. Gauff reached the semifinals of this year’s French, losing to world No. 1 Iga Swiatek in the semifinals. Swiatek won her third straight French Open this year.
Swiatek isn’t skipping the Olympics.
Gauff’s selection as flag bearer caps off an incredible start to an American athlete career. She first emerged five years ago, at Wimbledon, when Gauff, just 15, upset five-time Wimbledon champion Venus Wiliams in the first round. She became the youngest woman to reach Wimbledon’s fourth round in almost three decades. Just a few months before that magical run, Gauff had lost 6-1, 6-1, in a qualifying round of a low-level pro tournament in Bonita Springs, Fla. She displayed little effort, and her mom, Candi, offered her the option to step away from tennis and enroll in a brick-and-mortar high school if she wasn’t going to at least give full effort.
She stuck with tennis, and after Wimbledon that summer suddenly found herself sitting in Michelle Obama’s Washington, D.C. office. Obama’s main piece of advice: It’s OK to say no to people when they’re making too many demands.
Gauff also showed maturity beyond her years in 2020, when she spoke out against police violence following the murder of George Floyd, against the advice of her parents who were worried about their 16-year-old daughter weighing in on a charged issue. “If you are choosing silence,” she said at a protest in Delray Beach, “you are choosing the side of the oppressor.” Her tennis fell short of expectations the next few years: pundits chirped about her forehand as being a weak spot. “That got in my head a little bit,” she told TIME earlier this year.
But a run to her first Grand Slam final, at the French in 2022, where she lost to Swiatek, lifted her confidence, and she delighted the hometown fans during her victory at last year’s U.S. Open, riffing on her love of anime and how doubters inspired her. She was the first American teen to win the U.S. Open in nearly a quarter century.
Now she’ll help lead America down the Seine.
