First steps
The future world tennis star was born in 1987, in the north of the USSR in the city of Nyagan, but did not live there long. Soon the girl’s parents moved to Sochi. Maria's dad Yuri, an athlete and part-time coach, opened the door to the world of tennis for his daughter.
It so happened that since the age of 4, Maria has been holding a tennis racket in her hands.
Interesting!
All of Sharapova's relatives live in Gomel, Belarus. Parents moved to Russia after news of the disaster at the Chernobyl power plant.
Developing his daughter’s talent, her father took her to Moscow at the age of 6 for a master class with tennis player Martina Navratilova.
It was she who saw remarkable talent in little Masha and recommended sending her daughter to the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy (Florida, USA). Without any doubt about the result, Masha and her father set off across the ocean to conquer the world of big-time sports, with only $700 in their pockets.
Moving to the USA
In 1995, having miraculously persuaded the embassy representative to issue them three-year visas, Yuri and his daughter went to Florida. The young father, at 28 years old, did not know a single foreign language and came to the United States with a 6-year-old child (his wife was simply not given a visa), having only $700 in his hands, borrowed from friends. But determination and sociability helped Yuri find housing and place his talented daughter in the Rick Bollettieri Tennis Academy.
At the age of 7, Maria Sharapova moved to the USA
In 1995, Sharapova signed a contract with the marketing agency IMG (worth $100 thousand per year) and, with its financial support, entered the famous private elite Bollettieri Academy in Bradenton. The educational institution combined an academic curriculum and highly effective professional sports training. At different times, its graduates included Anna Kournikova, Boris Becker, and Andre Agassi.
It was very difficult for the young talent to study at the academy - once Maria was even close to expulsion. However, the Russian woman had plenty of fighting spirit and perseverance. In 1997, Sharapova’s mother also came to the United States - she began to help her with her homework and support her daughter in every possible way. During the same period, Maria signed her first contract with Nike for $50 thousand a year.
Sports career
The victory in 2004 at Wimbledon marked a new era in Maria's life. Now she has also become the eighth racket in the world and the first Russian to win Wimbledon.
Then there were the Australian Open and American Open championships. Games of various levels in Moscow, Tokyo, Beijing.
Sharapova has never dropped below third place in the standings. Possessing a strong character, she never gave her rivals an easy victory and always stood until the last. Even with a shoulder injury, she carried on well.
Now the tennis player has announced that she is retiring from the sport because the pain has become unbearable, and every appearance on the court is already a victory.
Living in Braidstone, Maria Sharapova was well occupied with her sports biography and personal life, but so far she has no husband or children and no plans.
Tennis player Maria Sharapova is a sports fashion guru!
In fact, as many journalists say, Maria attracts not only her sports talents. After all, now after such a long disqualification, she is only the 57th racket in the world. Journalists write that Maria Sharapova and the latest news about her life always cause such a resonance that they just want to look at her. Just look at the girl, and not at her game.
Maria Sharapova on the court
And all the tournament organizers unanimously say that now, even though the girl is now low in the ranking of tennis players, she makes huge money at absolutely every tournament in which she takes part. But it’s worth replacing one more fact: the athlete is rising in the rankings very quickly and she recently made a statement that she cannot be so low and will soon return her previous title.
Also, even though so many years have passed around this action, the tennis player still attracts with her screams on the court. Nobody screams like Masha screams on the court. Her voice exceeds in decibels the sounds that come from a Boeing aircraft. For many years, all the tennis players who played with a girl repeatedly said that it was very distracting on the court. It’s impossible to concentrate on the game when your opponent is screaming so loudly.
This question has been raised more than once, but fortunately for Maria’s fans, a ban on the sound effects accompanying her on impact was never introduced.
M. Sharapova and Serena Williams
At the first match in the Kremlin, Sharapova will meet Magdalena Rybarikova. Many years ago, the girls already met on the court, and Maria won that time. Many spectators of the match and fans have already begun to sympathize with Magdalena, because in the first round it is a clear failure to get to such a strong opponent. Moreover, now Masha is determined only to win and nothing else.
Although they say that the girl is also among the favorites of the Kremlin tournament. She has a lot of worthy matches under her belt. She competed in the Wimbledon semi-finals. In the previous tournament in Linz, she reached the final. And in the ranking, she is much higher than Maria, in 26th place. And the girl also has a lot of fans. Therefore, the match promises to be very interesting and it will begin very soon.
Main rivals
Over the years, Sharapova's rivals were Serena Williams, Russians Dinara Safina, Svetlana Kuznetsova.
At Wimbledon 2004, Sharapova defeated Williams, and three years later lost the championship to her. Maria lost again to Serena in 2011 at Roland Garros, and then won and collected all the Grand Slam awards. The 2012 London Olympics also brought Sharapova second place and Williams first.
Interesting!
Maria Sharapova is ambidextrous and is good with both hands.
It is noteworthy that Maria met with Grigor Dimitrov, and he was the ex-boyfriend of Serena Williams.
Sharapova's English boyfriend loves Repin and Russian bathhouse
Alexander Gilkes, his double-breasted jackets and friendship with princes.
Maria Sharapova spent the 2018 season even more mediocre than the last, when, after being disqualified, she began to play only in the spring. 31-year-old Sharapova played in one Slam quarterfinal, but at Wimbledon she lost for the first time in the first round, suffered four defeats in a row in one segment (for the first time since the beginning of the 2000s), did not reach a single final and ended the season early from - for injuries. When her title points expire in Tianjin later this week, she will drop to the bottom of the top 30 and could miss the Australian Open seeding again.
However, Sharapova traditionally approached her vacation thoroughly. This time it is not occupied by the wine-growing Napa Valley or the cult Copenhagen restaurant noma, but by Frieze Week in London - one of the four largest contemporary art fairs (Frieze Art Fair), which takes place in the British capital for the 16th time.
Sharapova has always been interested in design, art, architecture - a quick glance at her Instagram is enough to pull out Picasso, Koons, Hirst, the Guggenheim Museum and various floral and wooden sketches. Recently, Maria has a full-fledged companion in this matter: her boyfriend Alexander Gilkes is an art dealer with an Eton diploma, who speaks four languages and jokingly calls the Vogue editor (pictured above) his cousin.
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Englishman Gilkes, 39, a baby-faced man with a colorful wardrobe, is known in Britain as a friend of Princes William and Harry, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, and the ex-boyfriend of Pippa Middleton. At the same time, he is an aristocrat not by origin, but by meaning: his father Jeremy is a famous dermatologist, and his mother Robin is a professor at Oxford and specializes in Russia and Eastern European countries.
“My parents wanted me to do something more stable, more predictable,” Gilkes recalled in 2016. “But I would cry from boredom, staring at Reuters and Bloomberg reports all day long.” So I lulled their guard with business internships, but in reality I was much more interested in working with Stanley Kubrick on the set of Eyes Wide Shut or spending time with Mario Testino. “I ended up finding that balance between commerce and creativity.”
According to legend, Gilkes's interest in art arose in his late teens, when he attended the landmark Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in Piccadilly in 1997. It featured works by young British artists from the collection of art market tycoon Charles Saatchi, including
and Tracey Emin's famous (burnt down in 2004) "Everyone I've Slept with from 1963 to 1995" tent.
Gilkes had a metaphysical connection with Russia even before he met Sharapova: at Eton (where he became friends with the princes), he studied Russian in addition to Spanish. “I have always had a special connection with Russia. My mother taught Russian at the university, so I was familiar with Russian literature from childhood. To understand it better, I began to learn the language myself. Russian culture played an important role in my decision to become an auctioneer: I love Repin, and Bryullov, and many architects. And my favorite cocktail, by the way, is the Moscow Mule.
As a student, Gilkes lived briefly in St. Petersburg and took away from there a love for the bath - he calls it “a pleasure that he will never give up”: “You are massaged with oak, birch and eucalyptus leaves, then you are plunged into ice-cold water, and then you are wrapped in muslin - and euphoria comes beyond reality.”
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After university, Gilkes worked for the elite concierge service Quintessentially, then went to Paris as a manager of the main luxury holding on the planet LVMH (during the years when Jacobs’ Louis Vuitton was disrupting the industry with collaborations with artists), and then to New York as a shareholder of the auction house Phillips de Pury & Company. There, in 2011, he and two partners founded the online auction platform Paddle8, specializing in inexpensive post-war and contemporary art. In the summer of 2013, Damien Hirst and Russian billionaire Vladimir Yevtushenkov, among others, invested in Paddle8, and the British Princess Eugenie (whom Gilkes calls the difficult-to-transcribe Eug) came in as manager. Last year, the Financial Times wrote that Paddle8 is “defining art collecting in the digital age.”
His experience as an auctioneer allowed Gilkes to conduct charity auctions for Madonna, Elton John and the American Foundation for AIDS Research over the years and acquire a useful network of celebrity acquaintances. Paddle8's successes have landed him on lists of the most creative and influential executives in the art industry, the board of directors of the New York Academy of Arts, and Vanity Fair and GQ's best-dressed lists.
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In 2008, Gilkes moved to the United States with his beloved Misha Nonoo (real name Edwin Eccleswhite), the daughter of an Iraqi man and an Englishwoman, who was born in Bahrain, lived in London from the age of 11 and studied in Paris. Gilkes and Nonoo met in 2003, when he was 24 and she was 17. “When we first met, I thought I had never seen such a cheeky teenager in my life. It was love at first sight,” Gilkes later recalled, and Nonoo said: “He was so handsome and so well dressed that I decided he was gay.”
In New York, Nonoo, a designer by training, founded a clothing brand and in 2013 reached the finals of the annual CFDA (Council of Fashion Designers of America) competition - the fashion Oscars, presented jointly with Vogue. A year earlier, Gilkes and Nonoo had been luxuriously married in Venice (before that, she, absorbed in her career, had turned him down twice).
Over the years living in Manhattan, Gilkes and Nonoo became a power couple, who was given more attention in The New York Times article than Anna Wintour (“Oh, there she is,” Gilkes said, seeing Nonoo in the far corner of the room drinking with a friend and wearing a top metallic colors and wide dark blue trousers"). The marriage broke up after 13 years of relationship in 2016. It is curious that shortly before the breakup, Nonoo introduced one of Gilks's friends to one of her friends. Five months ago they got married in Windsor:
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The details of Gilkes's love story with Sharapova are unknown - they both rarely talk about personal things. It’s just that at the beginning of the year they were spotted together at Los Angeles airport, and then in London, Paris, pastoral Italy, New York and visiting Marina Abramovich. Over the weekend at Frieze, they received fake Swiss passports as a symbol of what they both must be close to - a world where there are no borders, neither countries nor opportunities.
Photo: Instagram/ mariasharapova
,
gilkesa
; globallookpress.com/ZUMA Press
Sports achivments
Over her 28-year career, the tennis player has collected many different professional awards. She became the winner of WTA singles tournaments 36 times, a Wimbledon finalist twice, collected all possible Grand Slam awards, and won the Fed Cup. In Russia, Maria Sharapova is an Honored Master of Sports.
Maria Sharapova has Russian citizenship, although she has lived in America since she was 7 years old. She can participate for the Russian national team.
Carier start
In 2000, Maria Sharapova made her debut performance at the Eddie Herr international junior competition. The 13-year-old girl received a special Rising Star Award as the most promising participant. A year later, the Russian played for the first time in a women's professional competition of the International Tennis Federation (ITF), although she was not entirely successful - she did not enter the third round. This circumstance somewhat upset her, but also forced her to train even more intensely and diligently.
Maria Sharapova in her youth
In 2002, Maria managed to reach the finals of two of the four Grand Slam games: the Green Continent Open and Wimbledon for girls under 16 years old. During the same period, she twice won ITF competitions with a prize fund of $25 thousand.
Playing style
Maria Sharapova has her own special style of play. She plays well on the back line, doing it aggressively, with sharp serves from the left and right.
The tennis player moves well around the court, makes all kinds of shots and defends well. Now her minimum is getting into the semi-finals.
Sharapova's scream is her calling card. Sometimes it reaches 105 decibels. In the early years of the sport, she had a powerful serve, but after injuries and two years of stagnation, serving ceased to be her strong point.
Sharapova's business
Together with Rubin Jeff (pastry chef), Maria Sharapova created a new confectionery product, Sugarpova. For three years (2012-2015) the company produced marmalade candies.
In 2020, the Polish company began developing a line of premium chocolate from Sharapova.
In the future, the athlete plans to release chocolate products for every day.
SHARAPOVA'S PERSONAL LIFE
In one of the interviews, the athlete honestly admitted that the last year has been busy for her with new acquaintances with men. “In the last 12 months I have had a busy personal life, a lot of dates. No, I don't have a boyfriend, if that's what you're wondering. I just enjoyed meeting different people,” said Maria.
By the way, the media suspected the Russian woman of having an affair with Spanish actor Andres Velencoso, but Sharapova herself denied this fact: “No, we’re just good friends.” Although European journalists could not calmly pass by the photo of the couple...
