How old is anna sharapova

Sharapova has built an impressive net worth and for years held the title of top-earning female athlete. Not only did she rake in plenty of dough by playing the sport and winning tournaments, but she also has had a number of endorsement deals. She appeared in commercials for Land Rover and Canon, as well as in ads for the watch brand Tag Heuer and the retail jeweler Tiffany. In addition to those endorsements, she also inked deals with Nike, Gatorade, Tropicana, and was named a brand ambassador for Porsche.

Tennis showed me the world—and it showed me what I was made of. But many are wondering why Sharapova is stepping away from the court at the age of Well, in an essay for Vanity Fair , the tennis star was candid and open about why she felt she needed to retire now and it has to do with that nagging shoulder injury.

Other sponsors like Nike, Evian and the racket manufacturer Head continued their support of Sharapova.

A portion of the sales are donated to the Maria Sharapova Foundation to support her charitable causes. In her personal life, Sharapova began a relationship with Slovenian basketball player Sasha Vujacic in , the two getting engaged the following year. However, during a post-match conference at the U. Open, Sharapova announced that the engagement was off and that her relationship with Vujacic had ended. Afterward, she dated Bulgarian tennis pro Grigor Dimitrov from to She has been linked to Paddle8 co-founder Alexander Gilkes since and the pair got engaged in December We strive for accuracy and fairness.

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American professional tennis player Serena Williams has won 23 Grand Slam singles titles and several Olympic gold medals.

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Afterward, she was signed to a number of product endorsement deals. By the summer of , she had won a spot on Forbes magazine's Celebrity list as the highest paid female athlete in the world.

Her father worked in the construction industry, and both parents were avid athletes. They had met in Gomel, a city in the Ukraine that was near the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, the site of the world's worst nuclear accident in April , just a year before Sharapova was born. When her mother became pregnant, she and Yuri decided to move east to escape the potentially damaging radioactive effects of the accident.

They settled in Nyagan, Siberia, where Sharapova was born. Yuri found work in the Siberian oilfields, but the climate was too cold for them. They saved their money for four years and finally were able to move to Sochi, a pleasant resort town on the Black Sea in the south of Russia.

Sharapova's parents liked to play tennis, and they gave her a racket as a toddler and began teaching her how to hit the ball. Because they could not afford a genuine child-size racket, they cut off the handle of an adult one for her to master instead. She proved a quick learner, and when she was six years old they traveled to Moscow for a youth tennis clinic. One of the celebrity athletes at the event was Czech-born Martina Navratilova — , a nine-time women's singles winner at Wimbledon.

Navratilova was impressed by Sharapova's skills and suggested to the parents that they contact the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Bradenton, Florida. This was a tennis-focused boarding school that had trained several future champions, including Andre Agassi — , Pete Sampras — , and Monica Seles —. But it's not my life. The Sharapovas decided to go to Florida and try to get Maria enrolled there. But only Yuri could get a visa a document permitting a foreign citizen to legally enter the country to travel to the United States, and so Yelena stayed behind in Sochi and waited for her visa application to be approved.

They also needed money for the trip and had to borrow several hundred dollars from Yuri and Yelena's parents. This was an enormous sum for her parents, partly because Russia was in a state of financial chaos at the time, and average working families like hers struggled to obtain the basic necessities of life in the new, non-Communist era in which the state did not generously provide jobs, housing, and healthcare for all citizens.

In Sharapova and her father arrived at the Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Bradenton, but they were told that admission to the school was by invitation only, and that the seven-year-old girl was too young to enter anyway. They remained in Florida, and a coach was found for her while her father worked as a waiter and took odd jobs to support them.

She learned English in just four months, and her tennis skills steadily improved. The Academy was part of the International Management Group IMG , a talent agency that handled the careers of entertainers and athletes, and its scouts likely recognized Sharapova's potential for future stardom. Around this same time, Yelena Sharapova finally received her visa and was able to join her husband and daughter, ending a two-year separation.

But when Sharapova entered the Bollettieri Academy, she had to live in its boarding school. She later hinted in interviews that it was a tough, competitive atmosphere, and she was sometimes the target of bullying by the older girls.

Her days included regular academic classes and as many as six hours a day on the tennis courts in practice sessions. At the age of eleven, she signed on with coach Robert Lansdorp, who had guided the careers of Sampras as well as Tracy Austin — , a two-time U. Open winner, and Lindsay Davenport — , who won three Grand Slam events between and Sharapova also signed with IMG around this time, and this paved the way for her first deal with Nike, the athletic shoe and clothing maker.

Sharapova won her first junior championship title at the age of thirteen. Two years later, she made it to the finals of the Australian Open Junior championship, which was her best ranking in tennis to date, and entered her first adult professional. Maria Sharapova's stunning victory over Serena Williams — at Wimbledon in made the Russian-born player the third youngest winner in the history of the tournament. Wimbledon, watched by millions of television viewers all over the world, is considered one of the world's most prestigious sporting events.

Officially, the Grand Slam event is known as "The Championships, Wimbledon," and is held annually in the town of Wimbledon, a part of the Greater London metropolitan area. The first Wimbledon tennis championship was held in the summer of , and the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club was its sponsor. The event included only men's singles, though they were known for many years as "gentlemen's" singles. Ladies' singles and gentlemen's doubles events were added in The present rye-grass courts of Wimbledon, located off Church Road, have been host to the annual event since There are nineteen courts in all, with Centre Court hosting the finals matches.

But the grass surface has proved an extremely difficult one for some of the world's top-ranked players, because the ball's bounce is not as high as on a clay court.