Inside the Lucky Loser Rule That Handed Donna Vekic a Title

The rule in plain terms

A lucky loser is a player who loses in the final round of a tournament's qualifying rounds but still gets into the main draw because another player withdraws. Slots are filled by ranking. The highest-ranked player among those beaten in the last qualifying round gets first call, then the next-highest, and so on down the list until the open spot is filled. It sounds like a technicality. It has produced exactly seven WTA titles in 46 years.

How the loophole got closed

The selection process was not always this clean, and I found the reason why in the format's own history. In 2005, Justin Gimelstob was accused of playing a deliberately poor qualifying match once Andre Agassi's withdrawal opened a lucky loser slot he stood to inherit, a suspicion of collusion serious enough that Grand Slam tournaments rewrote the rule. Now, if a withdrawal happens after qualifying has finished, the highest-ranked loser still enters automatically, exactly as before. If it happens earlier, while qualifying is still being played, the open spot goes to a random draw among the top losers instead, so no player can calculate a soft landing for themselves.

How Vekic fit the pattern

Vekic's path matches the classic case. She was the highest-ranked loser left over from qualifying when Marta Kostyuk withdrew from the main draw, so the spot came to her automatically, no lottery involved. She entered ranked outside the top 70, won five main-draw matches on grass, her best surface, and closed out the title against home favorite Emma Raducanu, 6-0, 7-6(6). Raducanu saved three match points in that second-set tiebreak before Vekic finally converted a fourth. Vekic's ranking rose to roughly No. 32 the following week, a jump of more than 40 places from one tournament.

A very short list

Vekic's name now sits on a genuinely short list. The WTA's own reporting credits only six previous lucky losers with turning the run into a title in the Open Era: Kay McDaniel at Atlanta in 1980, Olga Danilovic at the Moscow International in 2018, Coco Gauff at Linz in 2019, and a cluster of three in 2023 alone, Maria Timofeeva at Budapest, Nao Hibino at Prague, and Sara Sorribes Tormo at Cleveland. Nobody had done it again since Sorribes Tormo's run, and nobody before Vekic had done it at the WTA 500 level or higher, one tier below a Grand Slam.

Not just a women's rarity

Men have pulled off the same trick a little more often, though it stays a genuine outlier there too. Ten men have won a title as a lucky loser since 1978, including Sergiy Stakhovsky in 2008 and Andrey Rublev in 2017, according to tennis's own historical record of the format. Most withdrawal-driven main-draw entries end the ordinary way regardless of tour: an early loss, a ranking bump, and a good story, not a trophy.

I think that gap matters more than the trophy count suggests. A ranking-based backup plan exists so a draw never has to play a player short, not to produce champions, and for 46 years it mostly didn't. Vekic's June is the exception the rule was never designed to create, which is exactly why it is worth understanding rather than filing away as one odd headline from a tournament most casual fans had never paid attention to before.