Zheng Qinwen Saves Match Point, Wins Seven Straight Games From 0-5 to Reach the US Open Last 16

Few players have looked as comprehensively beaten as Zheng Qinwen did in the third round of the US Open — and few have reversed it the way she did. The Olympic champion dropped the first set to Madison Keys 1-6 and fell behind 0-5 in the decider, with the former Australian Open champion serving for the match. Keys got within one point of the win. Zheng saved the match point, broke serve twice as her opponent stood two games from victory, and took seven consecutive games to close it out 1-6, 7-6 (3), 7-5.

Scorelines like that have essentially no precedent. As Chinese tennis accounts were quick to note, it was the first time in the Open era that a player trailing 0-5 in the deciding set of a Grand Slam main-draw match had come back to win 7-5 — and only the second comeback from 0-5 in any decider, after Chanda Rubin's 8-6 escape against Jana Novotná at the 1995 French Open (the post that dug up the record has been circulating all day).

The win is the latest turn in a season that has become its own running story. A month ago Zheng arrived at Flushing Meadows ranked 121st in the world and had to come through qualifying just to reach the main draw; her first-round victory over a 16-year-old was her first Grand Slam match win in more than a year. Since then she has not played a single match in straight sets. Friday was her fourth consecutive three-setter and stretched her winning run to six matches, sending her into the second week of a major for the sixth time in her career.

"At 0-5 I was thinking, I can't let her make it 6-0 — that would be far too embarrassing," Zheng said in a courtside interview carried by the streaming platform Migu. "At 2-5 I told myself not to give away a single point. I knew how I wanted to play, and little by little I could see she was getting flustered — that gave me more fight." Winning seven straight games from there, she said, was "unbelievable — a classic match for me." The commentator Chen Junle reached for an older image: "The Zheng Qinwen who refused to die on the Paris Olympic court two years ago is back," he wrote.

The match, played overnight Beijing time, kept a good share of Chinese sports social media awake and anxious. One live-blogging fan confessed her hands were shaking and her chest tightening as Zheng clawed back to 4-5; her match-point post has since been liked more than 12,000 times. On Zhihu, the question "Zheng Qinwen 2-1 Keys: how do you evaluate her performance?" reached the platform's hot list within hours, with the top answers less interested in the drama than in the tally of escaped match points that led into it.

Next comes the winner of Iga Swiatek's match against Marie Bouzkova for a place in the quarter-finals, and a live ranking back inside the top 80. Six matches into her return from the rankings basement, Zheng has yet to win one in straight sets.