Maria Sharapova, a five-time Grand Slam singles winner and business entrepreneur, has been facing a hard time recently. She was banned for 15 months for the use of meldonium, a prescribed heart medication she had been taking for 10 years. It was added to the banned drug list right after she tested positive for it at the 2016 Australian Open.
The tennis star says she was never advised of the change and fought to overturn her suspension. She wasn’t able to, but it was reduced from two years to 15 months. She has been unable to get a wild-card spot for either the French Open or Wimbledon, which was the first major title she won at only 17-years-old. Now she awaits the decision of the USTA regarding a wild-card entry for the upcoming U.S. Open. Sharapova was the 2006 U.S. Open champion.
All of this setbacks hasn’t stopped the player, who moved from Siberia with her father as a young girl to attend the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy (now IMG Academy), writes Hamptons Magazine. Sharapova took a global strategic management class at Harvard Business School, interned at an advertising agency, shadowed NBA Commission Adam Silver, and completed her autobiography, Unstoppable: My Life So Far.
Sharapova sat down with Hamptons to discuss her book and her life. She said that by going through all the experiences of the past few years, she learned that “as a woman especially, vulnerability is not something that is easy to share.” But because of that, she shares a lot more in the book than she would have if she hadn’t gone through everything she did. She is not hesitant to talk about her suspension in the book, and writes that she had days of despair after getting suspended because everything she had worked so hard for since she was four-years-old was taken away.
“When you have something taken away from you, you don’t know if you can ever get it back,”Sharapva told Hamptons. “So I have a lot to [feel] fortunate for!”
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