Maria Sharapova
with Rich Cohen
UNSTOPPABLE
MY LIFE SO FAR
I know how this is. The beginning of a book. Dedication, they call it. The page we tend to skip. Next!
But this book is for you.
We might have never met, or met each other briefly. You might have never heard of me.
If you already know a little bit about my story, thank you for wanting to know more.
For trusting me with your time. For being curious. Maybe it was simply the cover that caught your eye. Thank you for taking the chance to pick it up.
Last, to the amazing number of you from all around the world who live through my victories and defeats as if they were your own. “Thank you” might not be strong enough words to show you my appreciation, but the gratitude I carry with me will forever be because of you.
Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.
PROLOGUE
At some point toward the end of the 2016 Australian Open, a nurse asked me to pee in a cup. There was nothing unusual about this—it’s just another part of the procedure, performed by the ITF, the International Tennis Federation, to drug-test athletes and keep the sport clean. I was twenty-eight years old. I’d been peeing in those cups for more than a decade, and I forgot all about the test the moment after it happened, my mind quickly returning to the matter at hand: the next leg of the tour, the next match I’d have to win to get where I still needed to go. I’d already won five Grand Slams, including the Australian Open, but the desire to be the happiest player on the last day of a big tournament never diminishes. In fact, it increases. As I neared the end of my career—in the first weeks of 2016, that’s all I was thinking about—I became especially aware of time. I’d only have so many more shots at a Grand Slam title.
Serena Williams beat me in the finals in 2015. Straight sets, with a second-set tiebreaker. It’s never fun to lose, but I went away optimistic, strong. I looked forward to the coming season, which would be one of my last. In fact, in those weeks, as I made my way from tournament to tournament across Asia, I was thinking less about the game than about my retirement. I knew the end was near and I wanted to go out in the perfect way. I’d take one last turn around the circuit, from the Australian Open, to the French Open, to Wimbledon. A kind of victory tour. I’d love the people and the people would love me. It would end at the U.S. Open, which I’d play just as this book hit the stores. Maybe I’d even make it to the final. Maybe Serena would be there, too.
Serena Williams has marked the heights and the limits of my career—our stories are intertwined. I approach every match against her with trepidation and respect. It was Serena whom I beat in the Wimbledon final to emerge on the international stage at seventeen, and it’s Serena who’s given me the hardest time since. I’ve beaten all the players who have beaten Serena, but it’s been nearly impossible for me to beat Serena herself. There’s a reason for this—she knows it and she knows that I know. It’s our secret, which I’ll get into in the fullness of time.
Maybe I’d find a way to beat her and my career would end as it began, with me holding the chalice beside Serena as the crowd cheered.
Well, you know what they say: Man plans, God laughs.
Three weeks into the season, I got an e-mail from the ITF. As I read it, I started to panic. That urine test I’d taken back in Melbourne? I failed it. Meldonium had been found in my urine, and in January 2016 meldonium had been added to the World Anti-Doping Agency’s list of banned substances. In other words, I was now a drug violator. I’d be suspended from competition immediately. A hearing would follow.
Meldonium?
I’d never even heard of it. This must be a terrible mistake. Sitting on my bed, I googled it. Looking at the results, my heart sank. Meldonium also goes by the name Mildronate, and that was something I had heard of. It’s a supplement I’d been taking for ten years. It’s used to treat many ailments, including coronary artery disease. Mildronate had been recommended to me by a family doctor back in 2006. I’d been run down at the time, getting sick very often, and had registered several abnormal EKGs. There was also a family history of diabetes. I did not think much about that pill, I just took it. I took it before any intense physical exertion, as you might take baby aspirin to ward off a heart attack or stroke. I was not the only one doing this. In Eastern Europe and Russia, Mildronate is like ibuprofen. Millions of people take it every day, including my grandmother! I had never put it on an ITF form—you’re asked to list every medication or supplement you’ve taken in the previous seven days—because I did not take it every day and did not consider it any different from the Advil I took for pain.
How does it enhance performance?
Even the ITF can’t tell you. Because it doesn’t. It seems the officials banned it merely because it was being used by so many Eastern Europeans. “Well, if they’re taking it, they must be taking it for a reason”—something like that. I’d missed news of the ban because it came under my radar, in a long list reached only by following a series of links included in an ITF e-mail, and I hadn’t noticed anything different. That was my big mistake. I was sloppy. And now that moment of carelessness threatened to ruin everything. I could be banned for as long as four years! Four years? That’s forever to a professional athlete.
A bottomless hole opened beneath my life and in I went. Everything I’d worked for since I was four years old, that whole crazy struggle, was suddenly cast in a new, terrible, unfair light. What followed were days of disbelief and despair.
“Goddamnit,” I finally screamed, rousing myself. “I’m going to fight this bullshit.”
What’s defined my game more than anything? Determination, tenacity. I do not quit. Knock me down ten times, I get up the eleventh and shove that yellow ball right back at you. “This will not beat me,” I said. “This will not be the last word.” To understand my determination, you need to know who I am, where I come from, what happened. You need to know about me and my father and the flight from Russia in the dead of night when I was six. You need to know about Nick B. and Sekou and Serena and a nice old couple from Poland. You need to know the crazy story. In other words, you need to know everything.
ONE
I’ve always loved to hit. From the time I was four years old. It’s the one thing that can fix any problem. You’ve lost Wimbledon in a frustrating match and everything that might have gone right went wrong? Pick up a racket and hit. The strings and the ball, the charge that carries through your body fixes everything. Hitting returns you to the present, where the flowers bloom and the birds sing. You’ve gotten terrible news from the other side of the world? Your grandmother died and there is nothing but a long flight and a funeral ahead? Pick up a racket, pick up a ball. And hit. The rules changed and you did not know the rules changed and all of a sudden a pill you have taken for years has undone everything? Pick up a racket and hit!
It’s one of my first memories. I was four years old. My father, who had taken up tennis a year or two earlier because his brother had given him a racket for his birthday, brought me along to the local courts where he played in Sochi. A small park with clay courts, a snack bar, and a Ferris wheel, from the top of which you could see over the apartment house to the Black Sea. That day, because I was bored, I pulled a racket and a ball out of his bag and started to hit. Off a fence, off a wall. I went around the corner and hit where other players were hitting. I was small and young and did not know what I was doing but quickly fell into a trance, the ball leaving and returning to my racket like a yo-yo in the palm of your hand. In this way, I got my father—Yuri; this is his story as much as mine—to stop what he was doing and notice me. In this way, my life began.