Maria Sharapova: The Point

This is a really big day for me today.

But I'm so strong, and I'm going to get through it.

I'm gonna be honest, I'm going to be,

I'm going to prevail because I'm,

I know that my honesty and I know that my truth

Will get me through this,

And that's the most important thing.

I've had the most beautiful life,

And I know that this is a big moment

But, I'm gonna succeed, I'm gonna get through this.

I am, I know it.

The morning of, it was, I woke up

And I felt like I was preparing for a match,

Like it was match day, it was game day.

It's always really hard to be like,

I'm going to go out in front of the world

And say that I fucked up.

Hello everyone.

Thank you for being here on such short notice.

I wanted to let you know that a few days ago

I received a letter from the itf

That I had failed the drug test at the australian open.

I did fail the test, and I take full responsibility for it.

and maria sharapova

Will shed tears into the red clay.

The champion is maria sharapova.

oh my god.

It's unreal, it's unreal.

maria sharapova.

My life is a very small part of the universe.

Sometimes the ocean's very still and very solid,

And it's like ice,

And you only see its reflection,

And other times it's so turbulent and violent.

We go through our own stillness and our own shadows

And then we go through the waves,

But they always rise and then they fall

And they rise and they fall,

And sometimes it's followed by stillness

And then they come back up again and it's an evolution.

I think the one thing about life lessons

Is we never really know when they're coming,

And we actually, I mean, in my life

I sometimes didn't even realize

Or I was going through a lesson until I overcame it.

Especially after 2016 and reflecting on that,

And this is certainly a situation in my life

Where I did reevaluate and I did look back.

It just gave me a sense of,

I had an incredible career and I've had my fair share

Of small comebacks and injuries and surgery.

Oh, and that's me.

See?

Hi.

But yet, I've maintained a career since I was four years old

And I've had this gift of competing and playing tennis.

And all of a sudden, it's just taken away from you.

I was just about getting ready to go out and train.

I looked at my email and I received an email from the itf.

It was a subject line that caught my attention,

Where it had my name in the subject

And the emails that I usually receive from the itf

Were all very general, speaking about the latest news.

I opened it, and then it said something about a test,

A drug test that I did in australia.

It mentioned a name of a supplement or a substance.

I did not know it at the time.

I found myself on my ipad like 30 seconds later

Looking up what meldonium was.

I had never heard of that word, never seen it before,

And then a packaging came up which read mildronate

Which I had seen many years of my life

And I knew exactly what it was.

It's very important for you to understand

That for 10 years, this medicine was not on wada's ban list

And I had been legally taking the medicine

For the past 10 years.

But on January 1st, the rules had changed

And meldonium became a prohibited substance,

Which I had not known.

now to that bombshell announcement

Rocking the tennis world, maria sharapova.

the highest paid female athlete

In the world for more than a decade.

off the court, a sponsor's dream.

The fashion icon and business woman

Making a whopping 30 million.

the five time grand slam champion.

- Admitting she failed... - she failed a drug test.

at this year's australian open.

For as long as four years for a failed test.

she could face anything

Between two and four years.

she is labeled now a cheater.

She's 28-years old, that would be career ending.

Well, the moment after the press conference,

I deleted all my social media off my phone,

So that was step one.

And I think it was, it was to protect myself,

To protect my sanity in that moment,

To protect myself against opinions, against judgment.

the cheaters are always gonna be a step ahead

you cannot say, oh, that escaped me.

This is her career.

there's no doubt in my mind

That sharapova was taking this substance

To help her in her performance.

I don't think I've ever gone through my career

Questioning what other people thought of me.

It wasn't something that was very important to me,

And then something happens and you're like,

Well actually you're walking on the street

And you're like, do they know, do they not know?

What do they think?

And it would drown me.

It would literally just upset me

And make me feel so small,

And for a woman that's 6'2" and feels confident

Most of the time about what I do in my life

And the profession I'm in, it felt really uncomfortable

To feel that small.

My mom, she just made me feel like no matter

If I was ever not going to hit a tennis ball that,

That's okay.

She must've spent a few weeks sleeping next to me in bed

Just making sure that I knew that someone

Was always with me.

In a way, through this whole process

My dad's been incredible, incredible, and so calm.

He's able to control a situation when shit hits the fan.

He's able to take a step back and evaluate it

And reevaluate it, and be calm and collected and cool

And make the right judgment,

You know, making sure that things don't come out of anger.

'cause in a situation like that,

You can put blame on everyone.

I could blame this person, I could blame that person,

And it was never about blaming.

It was about taking control of it

And being like, we all fucked up, you know?

You, me, your mom, our team, but this is what happened

And now we're gonna find a way to get through it.

just listen to this.

No russian has ever one a single's title here at wimbledon.

And a new star is born here.

And maria sharapova, 17-years old,

Becomes the third youngest wimbledon champion of all time.

I just feel like maybe I'm a bit of a new, fresh air,

You know, in women's tennis,

Which is great because you haven't seen

A lot of 17-year olds win a grand slam lately.

So, maybe we're coming back to the old times.

the champion is maria sharapova.

The 19-year old has her second grand slam championship.

I started playing a pretty full schedule at that point

And I realized a total decline in my health.

My parents said, well actually we don't have a doctor.

We have an athlete that's a grand slam champion

That doesn't even have a family doctor.

Nice.

And so that's the time when my father

Found a doctor in russia, because I was still a teenager.

Woah, woah, woah.

My father, he was kind of the captain of my team.

And america was very foreign to him,

Even though we'd lived here for years

He was still much more comfortable

Speaking to the russian doctor.

He was not a doctor that ever

Had any work done with an athlete.

He worked with immune systems of children,

And he was actually a pediatrician.

He did all those tests, and that gave me a list.

Actually, it was quite an extensive list

Especially for a teenager, of different substances

That he recommended that I take

And mildronate was one of the 10.

I was given this medicine by my doctor

For several health issues that I was having

Back in 2006.

I was getting sick a lot, I was getting the flu

Every couple of months.

I had irregular ekg results.

So, in russia mildronate was an over-the-counter substance.

It's taken almost like an aspirin back home.

From wada laboratories with an official stamp and signature

Saying all the substances that he had recommended

For me to take were completely permitted and legal.

I think around 12 times in 2015 and the previous nine years,

And everything was fine.

It was determined that meldonium was going

From the monitoring list to the prohibited list.

At the end of 2015, players were sent emails

And there was nothing about meldonium

Written front and center in any of them.

It was just very disappointing to learn

What other federations did in order to warn their athletes,

Because if I was warned,

When I would have received that email in January,

I would have at least known what the word meldonium was.