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17 Year old Tennis Prodigy Maria Sharapova Post Wimbledon Interview 04.07.04ITV [ITN] News) close X Running Time Approximately: 15 minutes Playlist Order: [Foreward] Maria Sharapova Post Wimbledon Interview BLOW TO RUSSIAN HARMONY SOURCE: guardian.co.uk Cyclops is suspicious of stories of some super-duper Russian system that is responsible for producing the present cast of starlets - French Open finalists Anastasia Myskina and Elena Dementieva, Maria Sharapova et al. Suspicious, that is, unless you consider that the following constitutes a system: frighteningly ambitious parents spot sporting talent in their little darling and ship her off to the US of A, where they really do know how to turn a girl into a tennis champion - or, more usually, into a disillusioned failure who would badly like her childhood back. Sharapova, 17, may insist, 'I'm Russian all the way in my blood,' but she does so with an accent with an American twang. She was only six when her father, Yuri, took her from the family home in Siberia to a tennis academy in Bradenton, Florida - and at times she must have wished that he hadn't bothered. Last week she told of how she was bullied by older girls in her dormitory. They would wake her late at night and tell her to clean their room. The parents' ambitions inevitably led to rivalries between their progeny and those around them that don't always stay inside the white lines. Cyclops hears of the following incident involving Sharapova and Nadia Petrova, another outstanding young Russian, at a tournament in Carson, California, last August. Sharapova pumped a fist at the start of a deciding third set, to which, according to Sharapova's dad, Yuri, Petrova responded with an obscene gesture. Yuri then taunted Petrova for the rest of the match, after which Petrova's coach, Glen Schaap, pushed Yuri into a rubbish bin. Security guards intervened. Some system.

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