28/03/2012 12:15 CEST - Rassegna internazionale

Sharapova, più brava che bella (Miami Herald)

One Maria Sharapova competed on the tennis court Tuesday, her powerful groundstrokes punctuated by her loud grunts. She clenched her left fist, slapped her thigh. On crucial points, she turned her back to the net and talked to herself, reprimanded herself and collected herself before smashing another winner. She showed no mercy in defeating Li Na 6-3, 6-0 in 68 minutes in the quarterfinals of the Sony Ericsson Open.

Another Maria Sharapova appears on shampoo, camera and wristwatch commercials swishing her blonde locks and projecting a sultry smile, or on the red carpet promenading before the cameras in a designer gown.
Sharapova captures the paradox of the female athlete. She’s expected to be gorgeous and gritty, cute and combative.

Not too gritty or combative and not too strong or ambitious lest she fail the femininity test. Yet the limitations of the female body and cultural standards of femininity aren’t exactly conducive to peak athletic performance.
Sharapova understands the ambivalence she feels about her image. She knows her fans love her glamorous side, and her opponents fear her feisty side. She wants to rip stereotypes the way she rips her forehand. But she doesn’t want to slouch around in gray sweatpants, either.

“From a fan’s perspective, it can seem very pretty and glamorous, but they’re not there when you’re waking up at 7 a.m. and practicing six hours a day, going to sleep at 9:30 exhausted,” she said. “So it’s a very thin line.”
She enjoys promoting her Nike clothing collection, doing photo shoots, attending Academy Awards parties. But she’s also competitive and a stubborn “borderline obnoxious 100 percent Aries.” Out of the public eye, there’s the normal Maria Sharapova, 24, who likes nothing more than hanging out with her family.

The red-carpet celebrity experience is actually “mortifying,” she said. “It’s one big illusion, to be honest,” she said. “Everything is perfect, the image of a person there dressed beautifully with hair and makeup and wonderful styling. “I come home an hour later and take everything off and where did all that glamour go?”. She’s an athlete first, a beauty queen second.

“When I go on court it’s like an oasis,” she said. “Everything I do is in my hands — win or lose.”
The Women’s Tennis Association is promoting the sport with a “Strong Is Beautiful” campaign that features photos and videos of players dressed in shiny tunics wearing makeup and jewelry with lots of unclasped hair flying around. And what are they doing in this attire? They’re playing tennis! That’s the problem. The photos aim to soften or disguise their athleticism rather than celebrate it. They are depicting women in getups as impractical for athletic movement as the corset or burkha.

We’ve seen these contradictory efforts before. Remember when swimmer Jenny Thompson posed mostly naked wearing red cowboy boots? She wanted to show that “muscles are sexy” (or at least that’s what the photographer talked her into believing). But she just looked silly and trashy.

Brandi Chastain made the cover of Sports Illustrated during the 1999 World Cup when she took off her jersey the same way men do. But the photo of her in sports bra was received like she was some kind of jock centerfold.
Martina Navratilova was a contestant on Dancing With the Stars and was almost unrecognizable in slinky gown or bare midriff doing the jive and flirting with the male and female hosts.“You look so pretty!” gushed one, as if it was a miracle that Navratilova could be made up to fit the prescribed notion of attractiveness. Serena Williams has also been a polarizing figure in tennis partly because she broke the mold on accepted physique and demure behavior.

There is no absolute definition of beauty. “If you feel beautiful, then that’s what makes you beautiful,” Sharapova said.
Easy for her to say, right? But she hasn’t always been 6-2, beautiful, rich and famous. She spent her early childhood in a desolate part of western Siberia and only her talent for tennis kept her from being just another immigrant searching for a better life.

After she had shoulder surgery and was out of tennis for nine months, she could have been content to be the second coming of Anna Kournikova. But Sharapova remade her game, changed her serve and clawed back from a low ranking of 126 to No. 2 today. She advanced to her first Grand Slam final in four years at the Australian Open, where she lost to No. 1 Victoria Azarenka.

Before Tuesday’s match, Sharapova had lost to Li three times in a row. She hates to lose. So she slugged and she screeched and she sweated. It wasn’t always pretty or “ladylike.” But she was strong and beautiful at the same time.