PARIS, France (AFP) – Five-time Grand Slam winner Maria Sharapova, one of the world’s most recognizable and highest-paid sportswomen, on Wednesday announced her retirement at the age of 32, and was immediately hailed as “a legend” and “great champion.”
“Tennis – I’m saying goodbye,” Sharapova said in an article for Vogue and Vanity Fair magazines.
“After 28 years and five Grand Slam titles, though, I’m ready to scale another mountain – to compete on a different type of terrain.”
Men’s No. 1 Novak Djokovic dubbed Sharapova a “legend” of the sport, hailing her “great impact.”
“She’s a very smart girl. She has the mind of a champion, someone that never gives up,” said Djokovic.
Sharapova burst onto the scene as a supremely gifted teenager and won her Grand Slams before serving a 15-month ban for failing a drugs test at the 2016 Australian Open.
The Russian former world No. 1 ranking is currently 373rd.
Sharapova has hardly played in the past year because of long-standing shoulder problems.
When she did feature, she lost as many matches as she won and was dumped out in the first rounds at Wimbledon, the US Open and, most recently, the Australian Open in Melbourne.
Siberia-born Sharapova first picked up a racquet at the age of four in Sochi, where her Belarus-born parents had settled after escaping the deadly clutches of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
She shot to fame as a giggly 17-year-old Wimbledon winner in 2004, the third-youngest player to conquer the All England Club’s hallowed grass courts.
She became world No. 1 in 2005, at the age of 18, and won the US Open the next year.
“One of the keys to my success was that I never looked back and I never looked forward,” Sharapova said.
“I believed that if I kept grinding and grinding, I could push myself to an incredible place.”
But in 2007, Sharapova began her long on-off battle with shoulder trouble.
She would win the 2008 Australian Open before a second shoulder injury kept her off tour for the second half of the season, missing the US Open and Beijing Olympics.
In 2012, the Siberian-born Sharapova captured the French Open to become the 10th woman to complete a career Grand Slam. She added Olympic silver to her resume that year.
