The Hindu : Sport / Tennis : Sharapova plans first trip to Chernobyl

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Wednesday, Aug 15, 2007
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Sharapova plans first trip to Chernobyl

CARSON (USA): Maria Sharapova travels the World as the highest-paid female athlete, cocooning in fancy hotels, dining at swanky restaurants and indulging her love of shoes.

Yet there’s one place the 20-year-old tennis superstar’s journeys have never taken her — the region devastated 21 years ago by the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster.

Sharapova’s mother, Yelena, was pregnant with her only child when the plant in Ukraine exploded and spewed radioactive clouds over the western Soviet Union and northern Europe.

“A lot of families were moving, but not a lot of them could because they didn’t really know where to go,” Sharapova told AP. “My mom’s dad happened to be working in Siberia, so that’s why we had a sense of direction,” he said.

Sharapova’s father, Yuri, and her mother fled the city of Gomel in Belarus — about 80 miles north of Chernobyl — shortly before she was born in Nyagan, Siberia, exactly a year and a week after the explosion.

Gomel was one of the areas most affected by radiation. Sharapova said she still has family there, including grandparents.

Sharapova plans to visit Chernobyl as a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador, perhaps after Wimbledon next July.

Short trip

Her trip to Chernobyl will last just a few days.

“Unfortunately, I have about 28 days a year for the work that I do and for the sponsors, for the photo shoots and the visits,” she said. “Time is very, very limited.”

Sharapova won her first title of the season a week ago near San Diego. During the tournament, she met with a group of Russian children visiting the United States.

Their trip was sponsored by The Children of Chernobyl, a non-profit group that brings healthy children from Belarus between eight to 12 years to America for a six-to-eight week visit. They are placed with host families and the children receive free medical, dental and eye care treatment.

Upon meeting Sharapova, some of the families asked what advice she could give the children. “It’s tough because most of them don’t have any parents, and what’s really helped me in my life was having my mom and dad be so supportive and around me,” she said.

Despite her Wimbledon and U.S. Open titles and No. 2 World ranking, Sharapova didn’t expect the children to know who she was.

“They had all these questions lined up for me. The kids are pretty young and the questions they were asking me were so mature and so beyond their years,” she said.

“This young kid asked me how I wanted to raise my children. I was like, ‘geez, you’re a kid yourself.’ It was very strange.”

The children knew only rudimentary English phrases, like ‘how are you?’ so they questioned her in Russian and Sharapova responded in her native language.

Fond memories

Hearing the kids squeal about their trip to Sea World brought back memories. As sophisticated as Sharapova comes off in photo spreads and on red carpets, she says she acts like a kid away from the court and cameras.

“I still love things that you don’t even need to pay for,” she said. — AP

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