Goodbye, tennis: Sharapova announces retirement
Paris: Five-time Grand Slam winner Maria Sharapova, one of the world's most recognisable sportswomen, on Wednesday announced her retirement at the age of 32.
"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."
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 number one's ranking is currently 373rd.
Sharapova has hardly played in the past year because of long-standing shoulder problems.
When she did play 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.
Sharapova 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.
- 'Tennis gave me life' -
She became world number one in 2005 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 on Wednesday.
"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.
Her 2014 French Open title was another high after a dispiriting injury low.
More fitness troubles followed before the bombshell announcement of her positive test for the banned heart drug meldonium.
Always a fighter -- the seven-year-old Maria and father Yuri left for the US in 1994 with just a borrowed 700 to their names -- Sharapova returned to the sport in 2017.
"In giving my life to tennis, tennis gave me a life," Sharapova said in her retirement missive.
"I'll miss it everyday. I'll miss the training and my daily routine: Waking up at dawn, lacing my left shoe before my right, and closing the court's gate before I hit my first ball of the day.
"I'll miss my team, my coaches. I'll miss the moments sitting with my father on the practice court bench. The handshakes - win or lose - and the athletes, whether they knew it or not, who pushed me to be my best.
"Looking back now, I realize that tennis has been my mountain. My path has been filled with valleys and detours, but the views from its peak were incredible."
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Congress names candidates for 8 Haryana LS seats, fields Kumari Selja, Deepender Hooda
Chandigarh (PTI): The Congress on Thursday announced candidates for eight of the nine Lok Sabha seats it is contesting in Haryana, fielding former Union minister Kumari Selja, Rajya Sabha MP Deepender Hooda and youth leader Divyanshu Budhiraja, besides two sitting MLAs.
The party has also fielded former MP Jai Prakash and leaders Satpal Brahmachari and Mahendra Pratap, according to the list released late Thursday evening.
The Congress is contesting nine of the 10 Lok Sabha seats in Haryana. It has not yet announced its candidate for the Gurugram constituency.
The Aam Aadmi Party, a constituent of the opposition INDIA bloc, will contest the Kurukshetra seat.
Congress general secretary and former Union minister Selja will contest from the Sirsa (reserved) seat and sitting MLAs Varun Choudhary and Rao Dan Singh from the Ambala (reserved) and the Bhiwani-Mahendragarh Lok Sabha seats, respectively.
Deepender Hooda, son of former chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda, will enter the fray from Rohtak. He has represented the Rohtak parliamentary constituency three times in the past.
Jai Prakash has been fielded from Hisar, the Congress' Haryana youth wing president Divanshu Budhiraja from Karnal, Satpal Brahmachari from Sonipat and Mahendra Pratap from Faridabad.
