COCO GAUFF HAS THE BEST MINDSET HEADING INTO THE 2024 OLYMPICS

Plus, the tennis pro shares how she’s pampering herself before the Games.

Tennis phenom Coco Gauff is known for beating Venus Williams at the tender age of 15, becoming the first American teenager to win the U.S. Open in nearly a quarter-century, and… her love of fruit. In 2023, the internet began buzzing about her changeover snack of choice — homemade fruit salad — after it accompanied her, packaged in a no-frills plastic container, throughout the U.S. Open. But Gauff’s fruit infatuation began when she was a child, trying to stave off the sweltering heat during long summer days spent training at Floridian tennis academies.

“We would always drink coconut water straight from the coconut because we had a lot of coconut trees,” Gauff, now 20, tells Elite Daily. “There would be a lot of mango trees near my grandma’s house, so we would grab the mangoes and then maybe get a banana and pineapple… that’s kind of where it started.”

Now, the athlete has partnered with Naked to produce a colorful line of produce-powered smoothies. As their first chief smoothie officer, Gauff recommends Naked’s new Lower Sugar Berrylicious smoothie, which is filled with one of her favorite fruits (grapes) and happens to be her favorite color (purple).

While gearing up for the 2024 Paris Olympics — her first Games, after a positive COVID result forced her to forego Tokyo in 2021 — the star chatted with Elite Daily about her quest to meditate more, her love of anime, and how her activist grandmother inspires her off-court confidence.