Coco Gauff still can’t wrap her head around the honor of being Team USA’s flag bearer

By Kyle Feldscher, CNN

Paris (CNN) — Coco Gauff may be a tennis prodigy and one of the top American athletes to represent the USA at the Summer Olympics, but she still finds herself getting caught up in the glamour of the Paris Games.

Gauff will serve as flag bearer alongside basketball superstar LeBron James – a role she has yet to truly wrap her mind around.

“I don’t know when I’m going to meet him, but I’m already stressed about it really,” Gauff told CNN’s Coy Wire. “I’ve never met him before, I’m excited to meet him and I’m excited to be flag bearer alongside him. There’s no other athlete I think I would have chosen to do this with.”

Gauff, just 20 years old, is entering her first Olympics after missing the Tokyo Games three years ago with a Covid-19 infection. She’s one of the faces of Team USA in Paris and says she’s finding the experience a little bizarre.

She described meeting American Olympic legends Simone Biles and Katie Ledecky since arriving at the Olympic Village – where she’s spent her time trading pins and riding bikes – and found it hard to comprehend that they knew who she was even though she’s a superstar in her own right.

It’s a lot for someone so early in their career to take in.

“It took a while for it to sink in, (it still hasn’t really) sunken in,” Gauff told Wire just hours ahead of her big moment. “So many people are coming up to say congratulations, not just from Team USA but from other sports and countries as well. I don’t think it will, until maybe a year from now or something because I think it’s just going to be one of those things like, ‘I can’t believe I just did that.’”

The women’s tennis competition gets started on Saturday and Gauff has drawn Ajla Tomljanović.

The world No. 2 hopes that her play in Paris, along with those of her nearly 600 teammates on Team USA, goes a long way toward uniting a divided nation back home that is currently in the midst of one of the most intense election seasons in recent memory.

“I just hope that me being a person representing Team USA … we all just want to promote positivity through our game, through our sport and through our competing,” Gauff said. “We all just want to show how passionate we are and share that passion with the supporters that we have and hopefully have a lot of success too.”

But as she prepares for her moment in the spotlight leading Team USA down the River Seine in a unique Opening Ceremony, Gauff is trying to focus on what most 20-year-olds want to do: Having fun.

“We just have a great team, the men’s and women’s team, we all get along we all have fun and I definitely think who your teammates are probably makes the biggest difference if you’re going to have a good experience or a bad one,” Gauff told Wire, “and so far, this experience has definitely been a once-in-a-lifetime type thing.”

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