- PARIS • Maria Sharapova, one of the world's most recognisable sportswomen, yesterday announced her retirement from tennis at the age of 32. "Tennis - I'm saying goodbye," she said in an article for Vogue and Vanity Fair magazines.
PARIS • Maria Sharapova, one of the world’s most recognisable sportswomen, yesterday announced her retirement from tennis at the age of 32.
“Tennis – I’m saying goodbye,” she said in an article for Vogue and Vanity Fair magazines.
“After 28 years and five Grand Slam titles, though, I’m ready to scale another mountain – to compete on a different type of terrain.”
Sharapova burst onto the scene as a supremely gifted teenager, winning her first Major, Wimbledon, at the age of 17 – the third-youngest female player to do so.
The Russian became world No. 1 in 2005 and clinched the US Open the next year.
“One of the keys to my success was that I never looked back and I never looked forward,” she said.
“I believed that if I kept grinding and grinding, I could push myself to an incredible place.”
But in 2007, she began her long on-off battle with shoulder trouble.
She would win the 2008 Australian Open before a second shoulder injury kept her off the WTA Tour for the second half of the season, missing the US Open and Beijing Olympics.
In 2012, the American green card holder landed the French Open to become the 10th woman to seal a career Grand Slam before adding Olympic silver to her resume.
Her second triumph at Roland Garros in 2014 was another high after a dispiriting injury low, which prematurely ended her year before.
While Sharapova reached her fourth Melbourne final in 2015, she again could not overcome 23-time Slam winner Serena Williams, with the American holding a 20-2 record in head-to-head meetings.
More fitness troubles followed before the bombshell announcement of her positive test for the banned drug meldonium at the 2016 Australian Open.
Always a fighter – a seven-year-old Sharapova and father Yuri left for the United States in 1994 with just US$700 (S$978) to their names – she returned to the sport in 2017.
However, she has lifted only one title – the 2017 Tianjin Open – since serving a 15-month doping ban, and barely played in the last year due to recurring shoulder injuries.
Although that suspension will always be a blemish, she leaves having earned US$38.8 million in career prize money, the third most in Tour history and behind only Serena and Venus Williams, according to ESPN Stats & Info.
“In giving my life to tennis, tennis gave me a life,” she said. “I’ll miss it every day.
“Looking back now, I realise that tennis has been my mountain. My path has been filled with valleys and detours, but the views from its peak were incredible.”
