Elena Rybakina and Qinwen Zheng moved into a meeting at the WTA Madrid Open on day four after tough wins, while Coco Gauff dominated her match and Victoria Mboko went out early. The day also carried over the mood from the men’s draw, where Jannik Sinner anchored a second day of Madrid headlines built around upsets.
Rybakina and Zheng did not cruise, which is what made their advance matter. Both had to work to reach the next round, and that sets up a meeting that now looks like one of the sharper matchups of the tournament’s early stages. Gauff’s win offered a different kind of statement, one built on control rather than strain, while Mboko’s early exit cut short one of the more immediate storylines on the women’s side.
The Madrid draw has already begun to split into contrasting paths: players like Rybakina and Zheng survived pressure and stayed alive for a direct collision, while Gauff moved through without the same degree of trouble. On the men’s side, the reference point remained Sinner, who helped define a day when Ben Shelton and Alex de Minaur were both out. Separate from Madrid, Sinner also made clear he did not want favorite talk after Carlos Alcaraz pulled out of Roland Garros, saying, “This is not what we should talk about.”
That leaves Madrid with a familiar tournament pattern and one important open question: whether the players who survived the grind on day four can turn survival into momentum. Rybakina and Zheng now meet with a place in the draw’s next layer on the line, and Gauff’s level suggests she is already building a case to go deeper. For Mboko, the week ended sooner than hoped. For everyone else, the draw has started to sharpen.
