[Jovana.]

I honestly think the foot just got some cramps and started hurting, I mean she did play such long matches, and I hope some good massage will take care of it in no time!

[Marilyn Monheaux]

I don't the injury is that serious either...

[cyannnnn]

she just need a break

[rucolo]

Links to the Cincinnati interviews:

R1, Maria def. Kuznetsova:
http://www.asapsports.com/show_interview.php?id=65455
http://assets.usta.com/assets/663/15...%2010%2010.pdf

R2, Maria def. Petkovic:
http://www.asapsports.com/show_interview.php?id=65477
http://assets.usta.com/assets/663/15...%2011%2010.pdf

R3, Maria def. A.Radwanska:
http://www.asapsports.com/show_interview.php?id=65541
http://assets.usta.com/assets/663/15...%2012%2010.pdf

QF, Maria def. Bartoli:
http://www.asapsports.com/show_interview.php?id=65600
http://assets.usta.com/assets/663/15...%2013%2010.pdf

SF, Maria def. Pavlyuchenkova:
http://www.asapsports.com/show_interview.php?id=65625
http://assets.usta.com/assets/663/15...%2014%2010.pdf

Final, Clijsters def. Maria:
http://www.asapsports.com/show_interview.php?id=65654
http://assets.usta.com/assets/663/15...%2015%2010.pdf

[gc-spurs]

Just for good vibes...

http://tennis.fanhouse.com/2010/08/1...a-steps-it-up/

o Knox Bardeen
o Tennis Writer

Maria Sharapova

I'm not talking about looks when I say that Maria Sharapova is hot!

Don't get me wrong, I'm not discounting her beauty. I'd just rather talk about how she's dominating the U.S. Open Series right now.

Sharapova has made it to the finals of both U.S. Open Series tournaments that she has entered. Now, she lost both, but the fact that she's playing deep into tournaments again shows me that she's almost ready to reemerge in Flushing next month at the final Grand Slam event of the season.

Along the way over Sharapova's two weeks of play, she's beaten two top 10 players two more in the top 20. Her game is sizzling right now.

As for the rest of the power rankings this week, I've only considered the U.S. Open Series matches, nothing else. That's a bit of a stretch from the normal full-season view I usually consider, but that's OK, I'm an American and I'm supposed to give hard-court tennis special attention.

So, before you comment and belittle me for not including either of the Williams sisters, remember that they haven't played any hard-court events lately.

* 1. Maria Sharapova | Record: 29-8 | Previous Power Ranking: 7 | WTA: 12
She hasn't won a tournament yet, but Sharapova is playing extremely well right now. She was defeated in the finals at Stanford by Victoria Azarenka and then, once again, in the finals by Kim Clijsters in Cincinnati.

* 2. Agnieszka Radwanska | Record: 28-14 | Previous Power Ranking: 8 | WTA: 9
Radwanska is benefiting from playing a lot this hard-court season as well. She made it to the semis in Stanford before losing to Maria Sharapova, and then lost in the finals in San Diego to Svetlana Kuznetsova in three sets. Once again, Sharapova did her in. This time in Cincinnati.

* 3. Kim Clijsters | Record: 26-5 | Previously Unranked | WTA: 4
Clijsters has only played once in the U.S. Open Series, but the one entry was a winner. She beat Sharapova to win in Cincinnati and only dropped one set along the way.

* 4. Victoria Azarenka | Record: 30-14 | Previous Power Ranking: 6 | WTA: 13
Sure, she lost in the first round of the Cincinnati tournament to Ana Ivanovic, but she started the U.S. Open Series off for the women by winning in Stanford. To do that she had to beat Marion Bartoli, Samantha Stosur and Sharapova.

* 5. Flavia Pennetta | Record: 38-17 | Previously Unranked | WTA: 20
The Italian has been impressive all summer and has not been ousted from a tournament before the quarterfinal round since Wimbledon. Pennetta has impressively defeated Hantuchova and Kelybanova in straight sets at the Rogers Cup. She also defeated Samantha Stosur earlier this summer in San Diego.

* 6. Svetlana Kuznetsova | Record: 18-12 | Previously Unranked | WTA: 16
The two-time Grand Slam champion won in San Diego, defeating Pennetta and Radwanska on her way to the title. Although she slipped up against Sharapova in Cincinnati last week, she handled the rising Russian star, Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, in first round action at the Rogers Cup.

* 7. Samantha Stosur | Record: 34-12 | Previous Power Ranking: 3 | WTA: 6
Since losing in her second match at San Diego, the Australian has been out of action. The French Open finalist will look to use her strong kick serve to her advantage on the hard court in Flushing Meadows where she should prosper.

* 8. Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova | Record: 33-15 | Previously Unranked | WTA: 22
The 19-year-old Russian is rising up the ranks on the WTA tour and creating havoc for players on the tour. She rattled off nine straight wins – including a title at the Istanbul Cup -- before losing to compatriot Maria Sharapova in the semifinal round at Cincinnati.

* 9. Daniela Hantuchova | Record: 24-17 | Previously Unranked | WTA: 28
Hantuchova's form has been in question of late, and she has not been able to find any groove to her game. What looked like a promising summer in San Diego, has turned disastrous by exiting in the first round of her last two tournaments in Cincinnati and Montreal.

* 10. Ana Ivanovic | Record: 16-13 | Previously Unranked | WTA: 39
Ivanovic, who did not receive a wild card to play in Montreal, injured her foot and had to retire just as she was regaining her form in Cincinnati. She impressively paved her way through Cincinnati before having to retire in the semifinal round at Cincinnati to Kim Clijsters. Her injury may keep her out of the U.S. Open.

In one person's opinion
Makes me excited for when the Spurs are on top of the power rankings

[lefty24]

Sharapova is a major Slam factor again.

http://msn.foxsports.com/tennis/stor...e-again-081610

Maria Sharapova will enter the U.S. Open with her best chance of winning a major since she returned from shoulder surgery in October of 2008.

But as she showed in her late breakdown in her 2-6, 7-6 (4), 6-2 loss against Kim Clijsters in the final of the Cincinnati Women's Open on Sunday, she's going to have to pull something special out of herself physically and mentally if she's going to win an elusive fourth Grand Slam title.

If she had been able to take care of three match points ahead 5-3 in the second set, or serve out the match at 5-4, or hold on to a 3-0 lead in the tiebreaker, Sharapova would have walked away from the tournament with her head held very high.

Instead, she will likely brood over the result for awhile. She won't be able to erase the sour taste of Cincinnati at this week's tournament in Montreal either — she pulled out of the event Monday due to a foot injury she sustained in the match against Clijsters.

While Clijsters — the defending U.S. Open champion — played extremely well to come back and seize control of the match, Sharapova is sure to ruminate on the one ridiculous backhand unforced error she made on the third of her match points, how she double faulted away the ninth game of the second set and how in the breaker, she committed five unforced errors, including two double faults.

By the third set, she was all but gone, receiving treatment for an ankle injury down 1-2 and losing steam off the ground and on her serve.

But Sharapova has always proved to be resilient, and if she can manage to put her harrowing loss to Clijsters aside, she'll realize that she's played better in her last two tournaments — Stanford and Cincinnati — than she has the rest of the year and she is close to being able to close out big-time matches again. Sharapova is right there with a very up-and-down WTA top 20.

Prior to Stanford, Sharapova hadn't beaten a top 25 player since October 2009, but there and in Cincinnati she beat No. 23 Zheng Jie, No. 6 Elena Dementieva, No. 9 Radwanska (twice), two-time Grand Slam victor Svetlana Kuznetsova, No. 22 Marion Bartoli and the red-hot teenager Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova before Clijsters used her stronger legs to trip her up.

“These tournaments have been great for me. I've played against different types of players, some have been challenging and I've had to come through,” Sharapova said.

Only one player — top-ranked Serena Williams — has shown herself capable of dominating the majors this season, and Serena will enter the U.S. Open not having played a match since winning her fourth Wimbledon crown due to a foot injury.

Even though Serena is certainly capable of working her way into the tournament, in her previous three title runs in New York (1999, 2002 and 2008), the 13-time Grand Slam winner has always contested at least a few matches before stepping into Arthur Ashe Stadium.

Since Sharapova returned from elbow problems two weeks before the French Open, she has compiled a 23-6 record and has lost to only to one player out of the top 25 — then-No. 30 Lucie Safarova in Madrid.

It's been nearly three years since Sharapova won her last Grand Slam at the 2008 Australian Open and she's overdue to make a strong run. Since her shoulder surgery, she has only come into two Grand Slams with her formidable serve at pre-surgery speeds — early this summer at the French Open and Wimbledon. In those locales, she pushed both multiple Grand Slam champions Justine Henin and Serena in respectable defeats.

But just because she's performed well at times during those matches, she was not pleased with being on the losing end. She expects to play well and it's a rare day when she comes off court when she thinks she was simply outplayed.

“You have to be a little cocky," Sharapova told FOXSports.com. “As athletes we have to be or we wouldn't be so tough on court. After the Serena match I knew I played solid, but I was bummed out because I know I could have won. I believed that then and still do.”

When she hasn't been too pooped from playing in back-to-back night and day matches, she's playing just as well as when she won her Australian Open crown and has more options in her bag.

She's junked the abbreviated service motion that she was using to protect her shoulder, and now she's going for both her first and second serves. While she is still double faulting too much, one of the reasons for that is she's hitting her second serve in the mid-90s and giving herself little margin for error as she's trying to place them very deep.

While she's criticized for double faulting, her mentality is that she's much more apt to hold service games when her foes can't jump on soft second serves and she'd rather double fault once a game than see three outright return winners scream past her.

Sharapova takes much the same attitude with her return of serves, consistently going for outright winners rather than just trying to get them back in the court. While on bad days this might be too risky of a proposition, her attitude puts tremendous pressure on her opponents.

Unlike her first few years on tour, she occasionally uses the slap and charge off second serves and while she much prefers a swing volley to a standard one, she is willing to stand her ground at the net to pull off spectacular volleys.

On great days, all those positive elements to her game shine through, but on mediocre ones, she remains vulnerable as the field has slightly improved since 2008. Plus, even though she's quicker than she once was and plays respectable defense, Sharapova is not a burner and can be yanked off the court in long rallies. She is not a brilliant shotmaker on the run and needs to dictate to win, which was evidenced in her loss to Clijsters.

Sharapova is not a patient person by nature. Not raising one trophy after the next, or not being able to deliver her money shots on a dime did bother her. She says she keeps things in perspective, but that perspective also includes a belief that she will win another major.

"I worked on patience so long during the injury and obviously wanted good results and wanted to go far in the Slams and this year it hasn't happened. But that the way it is and I'm not going to quit because I didn't,'' said Sharapova, who won her sole U.S. Open crown in 2006. "I was No. 1 in summer, I got injured and had just won a Slam (the Aussie Open) and (then) I'm out of the game the next nine months. I'm not one to sit and say what could have been and I've said this from day one that I'm just really fortunate to have come back.”

Assuming her foot injury heals in time, Sharapova has established herself as a substantial contender for this year's U.S. Open. With Henin out and both the Williams sisters hurt, only Clijsters and Kuznetsova will likely enter the tournament healthy and with resumes close to Sharapova's.

So now the 23-year-old Sharapova has edged closer to being able to declare herself a legend in the making once again. But whether she can put it all together in New York remains to be seen.

“I want to perform my best at the Open and peak there,” she said.

She went from not beating a top 40 player to being a major slam contender.
These positive articles are making me really happy. I have really good feeling about the US Open.

[gc-spurs]

Good draw + day in between matches

[Sp!ffy]

I don't want to be a debby downer but they've been saying Maria's a "slam contender" since RG 09

However, I think she is a definite slam contender now...more than ever before at least.


And wow, I never heard that quote from Maria where she said that she thought she could have beat Serena at Wimbledon.

[gc-spurs]

Least they can back it up quantitatively this time round. Not just for her fighting spirit.

[cyannnnn]

Maria Sharapova returns to her roots in the wasteland of Chernobyl
You would think that Maria Sharapova's trek through the irradiated wilderness of eastern Belarus should end, definitively, her portrayal as the selfish little rich girl.

By Oliver Brown in Gomel, Belarus
Published: 7:30AM BST 19 Aug 2010

Future hope: Maria Sharapova with children from the stricken area of Gomel, near the Chernobyl disaster site Photo: A.Poltier-Mutal/UNDP
But for the young woman who has established herself as the highest-paid female athlete on the planet, some trappings of extravagance must endure even in the most blasted landscapes.
The scene is a remote regional airfield outside Gomel. Its terminal building is a stark Soviet monolith and it is scattered with rusting Tupolevs you would only dare to board after several vodkas. But this is far from an average day, as a vision in the flawless midday sky soon shows.

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For coming in to land is one gleaming and highly incongruous private jet, bearing the self-styled princess that is Miss Sharapova.
The 23 year-old, wearing a simple grey dress, emerges from the aircraft, then is garlanded with bouquets by fawning local dignitaries. My own journey involved a stopover in Vienna and a profoundly unpleasant, three-hour interrogation by consular officials at Minsk airport.
But then, Belarus is run by a repressive autocrat, Alexander Lukashenko, and announcing myself in the dead of night as a visa-less English journalist does not open quite as many doors as if I were a blonde, beautiful Russian tennis player.
Still, after a £300 payment and many rather undignified pleas for clemency, I am here in the country's heartland to watch Sharapova come home.
Well, not home exactly, but to the Chernobyl fall-out zone; to the place whose grotesque fate she escaped only fractionally. It was during the early hours of April 26, 1986, when newsreels began running with the words: "There has been a nuclear accident in the Soviet Union.
There is speculation that people have been injured, and may have died." Almost a year later, once parents Yuri and Yelena had fled the poisoned streets of Gomel for western Siberia, Maria Yuryevna Sharapova was born.
Yuri, who had to take a job on the Siberian oilfields, is accompanying her on this trip, her first to the region for 11 years.
You may remember him as the boisterous father from the Wimbledon ladies' final in 2004, driven half-mad with joy as he embraced his 17-year-old starlet, who had just swept Serena Williams aside in straight sets.
Since he is a notoriously volatile soul, Sharapova has dispensed with him as a coach, but not as a companion for her return to the land that shaped her future.
"It's very emotional," Yuri admits. "There's a big sense of her reconnecting with her roots, even though she wasn't born here. Back in '86, it was just crazy. People panicked, packed up their bags and if they had chance, tried to escape."
He was one of them, terrified by the radiation cloud gathering over Gomel and the growing incidence of neighbours falling sick. Yelena, too, who became pregnant with Maria four months after the catastrophe, has talked of the birth defects she feared would arise.
At several points during this visit Yuri, who having transplanted Sharapova to Florida aged six, spends private time with his daughter, whether walking through sun-dappled forests to share his memories or taking her to the municipal hospital to see her grandmother, Galina.
Sharapova grasps the pain of her family history and has read, voraciously, about the impact of the Chernobyl catastrophe.
She is keenly aware that 9,000 people around Gomel will die prematurely because of their exposure to radioactive dust and has not hesitated in her work as an ambassador to the region, on behalf of the United Nations Development Project.
"My dad's family still live here, so there are a lot of people I'm coming back to," she says. "I was too young to appreciate all the details, apart from the fact that there had been a big disaster, but as I grew older I became more interested, wanting to help people who had been affected or been born here.
"Too many people have forgotten about Chernobyl, but I'm determined to remember. I'm trying to help the kids who have been born since, to find a way of their own, to give them perspective."
Assuredly, the children of the 'Gomel Oblast', as this area is known, need her care and the money the attention can bring – as she discovers in Chechersk District Hospital, there has been a 1,400 per cent increase since the disaster of those being born with thyroid cancer.
Sharapova is often depicted as an ice maiden, as a shopaholic who would rather be pouting in shoots for her fashion label than be acquainted with the depths of human misery, and yet her interaction with the gravely ill children of Chechersk is affecting.
Few in the hospital's 'Fairytale room', designed for healing psychotherapy, exhibit any physical deformities, but all too many harbour cancerous tumours. Spotting one boy playing with a smiling toy fish, she tells him: "There's a kids' film called Finding Nemo. That one looks like Nemo."
After learning from the resident doctors how her donations have helped pay for more advanced cancer-screening equipment, she explains: "Those are the touching moments that make you smile, when you can witness how your efforts are helping people."
For Yuri, the experience is almost too much to bear. As I walk with him around Chechersk's arts centre, he says: "You've seen it for yourself. This town is in the middle of nowhere and it feels like nothing can happen. But you give the people hope."
It feels only fitting, then, that the children supported by her funding stage a concert in her honour. Sharapova has pledged more than £250,000 for their rehabilitation, and the UN have sought to channel this into reviving the rich musical culture that existed here before the safety test at Chernobyl's nuclear reactor No 4 went so hideously wrong.
It is hard to deny the success: Yana Grishanenko, a 10-year-old girl from the village of Krasnoye, has just won an international diploma for her singing.
"When everything is destroyed, what grows in its place?" Sharapova asks. "I want to visit these children to find out how they are doing. Tennis is only a game, but it is my platform, my opportunity to help people.
"I'd like to do more of this, when my sports career is over. I can have dresses, cars, my own fashion label, but it doesn't necessarily make me happy. Coming here, though, gives me an unbelievable feeling of happiness."
Sharapova's smile is never broader than when she stands in the evening shadow of the decrepit apartment block where her parents used to live. From a top-storey window an old woman recognises the glamorous figure in the courtyard, and tells all who care to listen about how a two-year-old Maria once cheekily tugged her hair.
Gomel might be as far removed from her cosseted California lifestyle as is possible to conceive – for one night only, she is forced to stay in the two-star Hotel Tourist, even if it is the presidential suite – but she relishes the sense of community.
I say to her it is my first time in Belarus, when we sit down to talk in Irina restaurant, which has laid on a champagne reception for her appearance.
"Culture shock, huh?" she grins. "Belarus has a tragic history, a lot of things have gone wrong for it. There's so much poverty, despair and drug abuse in these towns, but I want to make people feel greater pride in themselves.
"My connection here is very real. It's probably one of the closest places I can call home. Even though I didn't actually live here steadily, all my family are from here.
"So this is where it all started. It was a big part of my childhood. My parents took a lot of chances in their life and, growing up, I was always surrounded by those decisions – I think, in a way, I subconsciously learned from that. It really meant that they wanted me to do something that I loved in my life. I loved playing tennis, and I couldn't wait to go out on the court and play."
While Sharapova can cut a sulky figure on court, she has rarely looked happier than when delivering a tennis masterclass to Gomel students, or when meeting the three recipients of a scholarship named in her honour.
Yulia Supichenko, at 18, is never likely to have the chance to earn, like Sharapova, £15 million a year, but through her idol's commitment to giving some of that money back she will soon be enrolling at the state academy of arts to learn easel painting.
"If Chernobyl had never happened, my life would have been very different," Sharapova acknowledges. "I probably wouldn't even be playing tennis.
"It's crazy to think I could have been born in the midst of all that. I remember my mum and dad saying that it was chaos. So I'm extremely lucky that I got out of it. There are 'what ifs?' What if I was never a tennis player?
"It does cross my mind sometimes. But I don't know want to know what that feels like, but I'm really grateful for what I had and what I did, for what I became and what I achieved."
It is nearly time for Sharapova to step back inside her luxury jet. Her boyfriend, Sasha Vujacic, point guard for the Los Angeles Lakers, and Max Eisenbud, her Jerry Maguire-style agent, both seem moved by the warmth of emotion she has inspired among Chernobyl's survivors.
Alas, one so in demand cannot stay longer than 24 hours, and already she must head to Sweden to satisfy some promotional jaunt for Sony Ericsson.
But you sensed, as she took to the skies over Gomel, that her brief, powerful impressions would linger. She was taking a little of this forsaken place with her, and leaving more of herself behind.
The stark monument to the world’s worst nuclear accident
Images of the shattered sarcophagus that had encased the Chernobyl power plant started to spread around the globe on April 26, 1986, and would come to stand as grim reminders of the world’s worst nuclear accident.
On the evening shift of April 25, engineers at the No 4 reactor had embarked on an experiment to see whether the cooling pump system could still function using power from the reactor, should the back-up electricity supply fail.
At 1.23am, power surged to dangerous levels, 100 times normal. Fuel pellets in the reactor’s core started to explode, and a minute later two huge explosions ripped off the dome-shaped roof. Large amounts of radioactive debris escaped into the atmosphere. Only when radiation levels set off alarms in Sweden, over 1,000 miles away, would the Soviet Union admit that an accident had occurred. By then the disaster had released at least 100 times more radiation than the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Much of the fallout was deposited in parts of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, forcing the resettlement of more than 350,000 people. But radioactive deposits have been discovered in almost every country in the northern hemisphere. Greenpeace expects up to 93,000 cancer deaths as a direct result of the disaster.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/ten...Chernobyl.html

[Marilyn Monheaux]

Fans: Evian will be co-hosting an event in New York City with Maria Sharapova, 11 AM – 7 PM August 24 at the Openhouse Gallery in SoHo.

via twitter

[da2nd_14]

Found this on Twitter.
AllistairMcCaw:On court next door is Maria Sharapova, hitting it good. Expecting a good US Open from her.
about 1 hour ago via mobile web

so im guessing the heel is better & that she is practicing in Florida

[Dieter.]

Originally Posted by da2nd_14

Found this on Twitter.
AllistairMcCaw:On court next door is Maria Sharapova, hitting it good. Expecting a good US Open from her.
about 1 hour ago via mobile web

so im guessing the heel is better & that she is practicing in Florida

That's good news.

[cyannnnn]

Comme les amateurs de tennis québécois, Lapierre pensait au moins compter sur la présence de Maria Sharapova, mais la Russe s'est blessée à la cheville dimanche en finale du tournoi de Cincinnati. «On avait réservé la piste d'atterrissage à Trudeau pour son jet privé, dit Lapierre. Son chum Sasha (Vujacic, le joueur de basket des Lakers de Los Angeles) m'avait même demandé le numéro de sa chambre à l'hôtel pour lui envoyer quelque chose à son arrivée. Avec ça, je ne pense pas qu'on peut dire que Sharapova ne prévoyait pas venir à Montréal...»

google translation

As tennis fans in Quebec, Lapierre thought
at least count on the presence of Maria Sharapova, but
Russia has injured his ankle in Sunday's final
Cincinnati tournament. "We had booked the track
Landing at Trudeau for his private jet, said
Lapierre. Her boyfriend Sasha (Vujacic, basketball player
Los Angeles Lakers) had even asked for the number
his room at the hotel to send something to
arrival. With that, I do not think you can say that
Sharapova does not plan to come to Montreal ... "

http://www.cyberpresse.ca/sports/ten...upe-rogers.php

so that means she really intends to come in montreal

[JadeFox]

Originally Posted by da2nd_14

Found this on Twitter.
AllistairMcCaw:On court next door is Maria Sharapova, hitting it good. Expecting a good US Open from her.
about 1 hour ago via mobile web

so im guessing the heel is better & that she is practicing in Florida

Originally Posted by ...DIETER...

That's good news.

Maybe it's just one of those temporary boo boos and she'll be ready for the US Open.