Maria Sharapova

• 1. Introduction

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  Maria Sharapova walked onto the Centre Court at Wimbledon in 2004 as a 17-year-old ranked 13th in the world, and walked off as the champion. She had just beaten Serena Williams, the top seed and two-time defending champion, in what the media called "the most stunning upset in memory." That victory announced something the tennis world had not quite been expecting: a teenager from Nyagan, a remote city in the Russian SFSR, who had arrived in Florida a decade earlier with her father, savings of just $700, and no English, was now the best player on the planet's most famous grass court.

  The questions that shaped her career were not simple ones. How had a girl from such modest beginnings reached the top of a sport dominated by the Williams family? What did it take to win a Career Grand Slam on a surface, clay, where she had repeatedly struggled? And how does a champion rebuild after a doping suspension, multiple shoulder surgeries, and years away from the tour?

• 2. From Nyagan to Florida

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  Maria Yuryevna Sharapova was born on the 19th of April 1987, in Nyagan, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union. Her parents, Yuri and Yelena, were originally from Gomel, in the Byelorussian SSR, and they had left their hometown shortly before Maria was born out of concern about the regional fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident. That decision to flee Gomel would later come full circle: as an adult, Sharapova became a United Nations Development Programme Goodwill Ambassador specifically concerned with the Chernobyl Recovery and Development Programme.

  In 1990, when Sharapova was three, the family relocated to Sochi. Her father Yuri struck up a friendship there with Aleksandr Kafelnikov, whose son Yevgeny would later win two Grand Slam singles titles and become Russia's first world No. 1 ranked tennis player. Aleksandr gave the four-year-old Maria her first racquet in 1991, and she began practicing with her father in a local park. Her first formal coach was Yuri Yutkin, a veteran Russian coach who noted her "exceptional hand-eye coordination" the moment he saw her play.

  In 1993, at the age of six, Sharapova attended a tennis clinic in Moscow run by Martina Navratilova. Navratilova recommended professional training with Nick Bollettieri at the IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida, a facility that had previously developed players including Andre Agassi, Monica Seles, and Anna Kournikova. With limited money, Yuri borrowed what was needed for the two of them to travel to the United States in 1994. Visa restrictions kept Sharapova's mother from joining them for two years. Arriving in Florida with $700, Yuri took low-paying jobs to fund his daughter's lessons while she waited to be old enough to enroll at the academy, training first with Rick Macci. In 1995, IMG agreed to pay the annual tuition fee of $35,000, and she finally joined the academy at age nine.

• 3. The Junior Years

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  Sharapova first drew wider attention in November 2000, when she won the Eddie Herr International Junior Tennis Championships in the girls' 16 division at the age of 13. The tournament awarded her the Rising Star Award, given to players of exceptional promise.

  She made her professional debut on the 19th of April 2001 -- her 14th birthday. Her first WTA tournament was the Pacific Life Open in 2002, where she won a match before losing to Monica Seles. Because rules restricted the number of professional events she could enter, she competed in junior tournaments throughout 2002, reaching the finals of the girls' singles draws at both the Australian Open and Wimbledon. At 14 years and 9 months, she was the youngest girl ever to reach the Australian Open junior final. She reached No. 6 in the ITF junior world singles ranking on the 21st of October 2002. Across her junior career, she won three singles titles, was runner-up at five, and finished with a win-loss record of 47-9.

  From 2003, Sharapova played a full professional season and climbed rapidly into the top 50. At Wimbledon that year, entering as a wildcard, she defeated 11th seed Jelena Dokic for her first win over a top-20 player, reaching the fourth round before losing to Svetlana Kuznetsova in three sets. By September she had claimed her first WTA title at the Japan Open Tennis Championships, then won the Bell Challenge in Quebec City at year's end. The WTA named her its Newcomer of the Year.

• 4. Wimbledon Glory

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  Seeded 13th at Wimbledon in 2004, Sharapova defeated Ai Sugiyama in the quarterfinals, then fifth seed and former champion Lindsay Davenport in the semifinals. In the final, she upset top seed Serena Williams to win her first Grand Slam title, becoming the third-youngest woman to win at Wimbledon, behind only Lottie Dod and Martina Hingis. She was also the second Russian woman to win a Grand Slam singles title, following Anastasia Myskina's victory at Roland Garros weeks earlier.

  The win triggered what the media dubbed "Maria Mania," a surge of attention and commercial interest in Sharapova. She entered the top 10 in the world rankings for the first time. Later that autumn, she won the year-end WTA Tour Championships, defeating an injured Serena Williams in the final after trailing 4-0 in the deciding set. At just 17, she had won two of the season's biggest titles.

  On the 22nd of August 2005, Sharapova became the world No. 1 for the first time, the first Russian woman to reach the top of the singles rankings, at the age of 18. She described it afterward in terms of how long she had been building toward this -- an achievement that had been in the making since those early days practicing at a park in Sochi with her father.

• 5. The Clay Problem

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  For most of her career, clay courts were Sharapova's least comfortable surface. She repeatedly reached the quarterfinals and semifinals at the French Open without advancing further, and a shoulder injury cost her most of the clay seasons in 2007 and 2008. It became one of the persistent puzzles of her career: a player good enough to hold the world No. 1 ranking, and yet unable to conquer the one surface she needed to complete the Career Grand Slam.

  The breakthrough finally came in 2012, when Sharapova reached the French Open final as the second seed and defeated Sara Errani in the final for her fourth Grand Slam title and first at Roland Garros. She became only the tenth woman to complete a Career Grand Slam. The victory also returned her to world No. 1.

  In 2013, Sharapova won the Stuttgart Open, which she would win three times in total -- the only tournament she won on three occasions. In 2014, she added the Madrid Open, defeating Simona Halep in three sets to claim her ninth clay title, joining Venus Williams as the third most successful active player on the surface. Her second French Open title came later that same year, when she beat Halep again in the final -- her fifth Major overall. The final lasted just over three hours and was the first time since 2001 that a deciding third set was needed in a French Open women's final.

• 6. Injuries and Suspension

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  Shoulder trouble was a constant presence across Sharapova's career. In 2008, an MRI scan revealed a rotator cuff tear she had been playing through since April of that year. After attempting to rehabilitate the injury, she underwent surgery in October 2008, and was forced to miss the rest of that season including the Beijing Olympics, the US Open, and the WTA Tour Championships. The recovery was long, and she dropped out of the top 100 for the first time in six years in May 2009, with her ranking bottoming out at world No. 126. She fought back to No. 14 by the end of that year.

  The doping suspension that followed a failed drug test at the 2016 Australian Open was a different kind of blow. Sharapova tested positive for meldonium, a substance that had been added to the World Anti-Doping Agency's banned list effective the 1st of January 2016. On the 8th of June 2016, the International Tennis Federation suspended her from playing for two years. On the 4th of October 2016, the Court of Arbitration for Sport reduced the ban to 15 months, finding that she had committed "no significant fault" and had taken the substance "based on a doctor's recommendation... with good faith belief that it was appropriate and compliant with the relevant rules." Russian sports minister Vitaly Mutko suggested publicly that Sharapova had been targeted because of tensions in Russian-American relations.

  She returned to the WTA Tour in April 2017 at the Porsche Grand Prix in Stuttgart, a tournament she had previously won three times. Her first match back was against Roberta Vinci, whom she defeated in straight sets. In her on-court interview Sharapova said: "The first few seconds before you enter the arena -- it's been a stage of mine since I was a young girl -- I've been waiting for this moment for a long time."

• 7. Life Beyond the Court

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  Sharapova's profile off the court rivaled her achievements on it. According to Forbes, she was the highest-paid female athlete in the world for 11 consecutive years, earning $285 million including prize money since turning professional in 2001. She appeared in advertisements for Nike, Prince, and Canon, and was the face of several fashion houses, most notably Cole Haan. She also appeared in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.

  Since February 2007, she has been a United Nations Development Programme Goodwill Ambassador, working specifically on the Chernobyl Recovery and Development Programme -- a cause that carries personal meaning given her family's flight from Gomel before her birth. In June 2011, Time named her one of the "30 Legends of Women's Tennis: Past, Present and Future." In March 2012, Tennis Channel placed her among the "100 Greatest of All Time."

  In 2018, Sharapova launched a program to mentor women entrepreneurs. She retired from professional tennis in 2020. In 2025, she was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame -- recognition that placed the girl who had arrived in Florida with $700 and no English among the permanent record-holders of the sport she had spent her childhood chasing.