why did Maria Sharapova feel so lonely why she getting hard tennis training in USA
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Sharapova and her father Yuri turned up 24 years ago, begging to be given a chance at the tennis club for rich kids run by the legendary coach Nick Bollettieri.
You can still smell the privilege. A security man at the imposing gates looks at my two carrier bags and assumes I’m homeless: “Excuse me, what are you doing here?” I tell him I’m here to interview Sharapova. He looks me up and down with thinly disguised contempt, and asks if I can move away from the entrance. “Or at least hide your bags. The first thing our guests can see as they drive in is your bags.” I begin to see how alien this must have felt for the Sharapovas, who arrived in America armed with only $700 and a dream.How times change. After winning a career grand slam (all four major titles: Wimbledon, and the US, Australian and French Opens, the latter twice), 11 consecutive years as the highest paid female athlete on the planet with total earnings estimated by Forbes at $285m, Sharapova is back at the IMG Academy, training for the US Open, her first major tournament since she was banned in March 2016 for taking the controlled drug meldonium.
Appropriately enough, we meet in the boardroom; Sharapova is as famous for her business sense as for her tennis. She bounds into the room in her training gear: fresh-faced, no makeup, alert, looking and sounding like an all-American girl. The most surprising thing is her size. Sharapova is 6ft 2in, arms and legs like tentacles, broad shoulders, massive hands. On screen (and despite the ferocity of those famous on-court grunts), she can appear slight and underpowered against her great rival Serena Williams; but in her own way, she is every bit as imposing.
“I love this place,” she says of the academy. “It’s my home base. This is where I came on my second day in America.” She smiles. “I can only do two weeks, though, then I start losing my mind. It’s really quiet and there is not much going on – which is great for training.”As you might expect of somebody who likes a lot going on, Sharapova has not wasted her time away from the court. She took a class at Harvard Business School in global strategic management, spent 10 days in London studying leadership, interned at an advertising agency and spent a week shadowing the commissioner of the National Basketball Association, Adam Silver. She has also written her autobiography, Unstoppable, a fascinating and well-written (with the help of Vanity Fair journalist Rich Cohen) insight into her struggles, triumphs, obsession with Williams, Russian pessimism and the roots of that famous haughtiness
You can still smell the privilege. A security man at the imposing gates looks at my two carrier bags and assumes I’m homeless: “Excuse me, what are you doing here?” I tell him I’m here to interview Sharapova. He looks me up and down with thinly disguised contempt, and asks if I can move away from the entrance. “Or at least hide your bags. The first thing our guests can see as they drive in is your bags.” I begin to see how alien this must have felt for the Sharapovas, who arrived in America armed with only $700 and a dream.How times change. After winning a career grand slam (all four major titles: Wimbledon, and the US, Australian and French Opens, the latter twice), 11 consecutive years as the highest paid female athlete on the planet with total earnings estimated by Forbes at $285m, Sharapova is back at the IMG Academy, training for the US Open, her first major tournament since she was banned in March 2016 for taking the controlled drug meldonium.
Appropriately enough, we meet in the boardroom; Sharapova is as famous for her business sense as for her tennis. She bounds into the room in her training gear: fresh-faced, no makeup, alert, looking and sounding like an all-American girl. The most surprising thing is her size. Sharapova is 6ft 2in, arms and legs like tentacles, broad shoulders, massive hands. On screen (and despite the ferocity of those famous on-court grunts), she can appear slight and underpowered against her great rival Serena Williams; but in her own way, she is every bit as imposing.
“I love this place,” she says of the academy. “It’s my home base. This is where I came on my second day in America.” She smiles. “I can only do two weeks, though, then I start losing my mind. It’s really quiet and there is not much going on – which is great for training.”As you might expect of somebody who likes a lot going on, Sharapova has not wasted her time away from the court. She took a class at Harvard Business School in global strategic management, spent 10 days in London studying leadership, interned at an advertising agency and spent a week shadowing the commissioner of the National Basketball Association, Adam Silver. She has also written her autobiography, Unstoppable, a fascinating and well-written (with the help of Vanity Fair journalist Rich Cohen) insight into her struggles, triumphs, obsession with Williams, Russian pessimism and the roots of that famous haughtiness
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