For Maria Sharapova, the past 12 months were probably the toughest ones in her career. It was on 8th March 2016 when at 12:00 PM noon in a Los Angeles hotel she announced a shocking news and the ban from tennis was immediate.
Sharapova upset everyone that day. ‘I know many of you thought that I would be retiring today,’ she had said. ‘If I was ever going to announce my retirement, it would probably not be in a downtown Los Angeles hotel with this fairly ugly carpet.’ A year after Maria Sharapova is a stronger, maybe more motivated woman, who has learned a lot.
Superficiality. That was basically the factor that brought Masha and her manager not to check the 2016 ‘Black Lists’ and also not to tell WADA for the third year in a row that she was taking Meldonium.
‘I had been taking it for ten years, and for about seven of those years I had gotten a written certificate from a WADA-accredited lab that all the substances I was taking were totally fine for me to take,’ the former world no.1 told Vogue Magazine.
‘I just became completely comfortable that they were fine. That’s the mistake I made: being too comfortable.’ She had a social life, she dated more than guy, drank more alcohol than ever, she said, and met Grigor Dimitrov.
Two months ago in New York City. ‘We closed down a restaurant after talking for five hours. He was such an important part of my life, and he’s a very delicate, complicated person.
It was so nice to just be normal human beings.’ Sharapova was supported by many people and friends, but the tennis circuit wasn’t so nice to her.
Cibulkova, Murray and Kerber didn’t have a positive opinion speaking about Sharapova. But that’s not a problem. ‘I spend as little time in the locker room as I can get away with, because I’ve set up another life.
I have family, I have friends. And the less time I spend there, the more energy I have for them. I’m respected for what I do on the court, and that’s much more meaningful to me than someone saying that I’m a nice girl in a locker room.’
The countdown has started: in 39 days, on Wednesday, 26th April, she will play her first match in 15 months in Stuttgart.
‘I have expectations of myself because I know what I’m capable of. Will I have those standards? Of course. Will I have to be patient? It’s not my greatest strength.’
