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Sharapova ends a career that was stuff of Hollywood

kriralok desk:

From the shadow of Chernobyl’s nuclear wasteland to international super-stardom and from penniless arrival in the United States, without a word of English, to estimated earnings of at least US$300 million.

For a long time Maria Sharapova’s story was the stuff of Hollywood dreams, a testament to the power of one individual to make it, whatever the odds, whatever people think.

A drugs ban in 2016 and persistent injuries cast a shadow over her career and on Wednesday, with an announcement in Vogue magazine, the 32-year-old brought her eventful career to an end.

“How do you leave behind the only life you’ve ever known? How do you walk away from the courts you’ve trained on since you were a little girl, the game that you love,” she wrote.

“Tennis — I’m saying goodbye.”

Sharapova shot to international fame as a giggly 17-year-old Wimbledon winner in 2004 — the third youngest player to conquer the All England Club’s famous grass courts.

She would go on to win the Australian and US Opens while claiming two titles at the French Open, despite famously likening her movement on Roland Garros’s crushed red brick to a “cow on ice”.

Siberia-born Sharapova first picked up a racquet at the age of four in Sochi, where her Belarus-born parents had settled after escaping the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

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