📍Sochi, Krasnodar Krai, Russia
1989 – 1994“Maria Sharapova was born in Nyagan, an oil town in western Siberia, in April 1987. Her parents, Yuri and Yelena, came from Gomel in Belarus and had moved east shortly before she was born, fearing the effects of the Chernobyl disaster. Yuri worked in the oilfields, but the Siberian winters were fierce, and when Maria was about three the family moved south to Sochi, a sunny resort city on the Black Sea coast, surrounded by palm trees and mountains. In Sochi, Yuri became friends with Aleksandr Kafelnikov, whose son Yevgeny later became Russia's first world number one; when Maria was four, he gave her a cut-down tennis racket, and she began hitting balls with her father in a local park. She trained with the coach Yuri Yutkin, who saw her extraordinary focus and hand-eye coordination. At six she attended a clinic in Moscow run by Martina Navratilova, who told Yuri that his daughter had real talent and should train in the United States. In 1994, when Maria was seven, she and her father left for Florida with only a few hundred dollars, scraped together from savings and family gifts, while her mother stayed behind because she could not get a visa; Maria did not see her for two years. Her father took odd jobs, including washing dishes, until she won a scholarship to the Bollettieri academy. In 2004, at seventeen, she won Wimbledon, and she went on to win five Grand Slam titles and complete the career Grand Slam.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today