Maria Sharapova announces retirement from professional tennis
Maria Sharapova is retiring from tennis after a
professional career that spanned more than
two decades and saw her
capture the career
Grand Slam, an Olympic silver medal and
the world No.
1 ranking.
Sharapova, 32, made her
professional debut on her 14th birthday in 2001. At 17, she won her
first Grand Slam at Wimbledon by upsetting top-seeded Serena Williams in
the final and became the third-youngest woman to win Wimbledon.
“In giving my life to tennis, tennis gave me a life,” Sharapova wrote in an essay announcing her retirement for Vanity Fair.
“I’ll miss it everyday. I’ll miss the training and my daily routine:
Waking up at dawn, lacing my left shoe before my right, and closing the
court’s gate before I hit my first ball of the day. I’ll miss my team,
my coaches. I’ll miss the moments sitting with my father on the practice
court bench. The handshakes — win or lose — and the athletes, whether
they knew it or not, who pushed me to be my best.”
She reached the No. 1 ranking on Aug. 22, 2005 and
captured the U.S. Open title the next year. In 2008, she didn’t drop a
set all tournament en route to the Australian Open championship.
“I
was a naive 17-year-old, still collecting stamps, and didn’t understand
the magnitude of my victory until I was older — and I’m glad I didn’t,”
she wrote.
Sharapova played the remainder of that year with a rotator cuff injury and eventually underwent surgery.
2012
was a key year in her rise back to the top of the sport, as she
reclaimed her No. 1 ranking while winning her first French Open to
complete the career Grand Slam. At the London Olympics, she took silver
behind Serena Williams’ gold.
The clay at the French Open exposed virtually all my weaknesses — for starters, my inability to slide on it — and forced me to overcome them. Twice. That felt good.
In
2016, Sharapova revealed she failed a drug test following the 2016
Australian Open. She tested positive for meldonium, a substance she’d
taken for years before the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) placed it on
the banned substances list. The International Tennis Federation
suspended Sharapova for two years, but the punishment was reduced to 15
month after an independent arbitrator ruled she acted with “no
significant fault” and that “under no circumstances … can the player be
considered to be an ‘intentional’ doper.”
Sharapova returned to tennis in 2017 without much
positive results. She had not advanced passed the quarterfinals since
Wimbledon in 2015. Sharapova finished her career having played in more
than 800 matches.
“Tennis showed me the world —
and it showed me what I was made of. It’s how I tested myself and how I
measured my growth,” Sharapova wrote. “And so in whatever I might
choose for my next chapter, my next mountain, I’ll still be pushing.
I’ll still be climbing. I’ll still be growing.”
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