wow tattoo blog: maria sharapova pics biography

Jumat, 05 November 2010

maria sharapova pics biography

Blonde, leggy, and beautiful. If those are the only adjectives you use to describe Maria Sharapova, then you’re selling the tennis world’s newest star short. While she may compare favorably to Anna Kournikova on the modeling runway, Maria is most dazzling when she steps on the tennis court. Her serve is overpowering, her ground strokes are penetrating, and her will to win is punishing. Maria officially arrived with her 2004 Wimbledon title—and she’s not likely to leave anytime soon. This is her story…

GROWING UP

Maria was born April 19, 1987 in Nyagan, a town in western Siberia, where her parents, Yuri and Yelena, had fled from Belarus a year earlier to avoid radiation from Chernobyl. Still too close to the disaster site, her family left their home as refugees again when she was two-years-old. The Sharapovs (Maria uses the feminine Sharapova) settled for a while in the Black Sea town of Sochi, known then as a resort village and home of Russian tennis light, Yevgeny Kafelnikov. Yuri had been an engineer in Nyagan. But as the family bounced from on home to the next, he did anything he could just to keep them together.Maria and her dad made the trip from Russia to Florida with a scant $1,000 in their bankroll, scraped together from their life savings and gifts from grandparents and friends. Yuri also added to the small nest egg by laboring in the mines of Siberia. Unsure even where Bradenton was, they eventually arrived in the Sunshine State amid catcalls from parents complaining Maria was an outsider, too young and not talented enough. Bolletieri, however, sensed something special in her. Maria began her education at his “dream factory”—the same tennis school that had produced the likes of Andre Agassi, Monica Seles, Mary Pierce and Jim Courier.