Unstoppable, screams the cover of Maria Sharapova's just-released memoir, with her usual timorousness. This must be received with at least an arched eyebrow by Serena Williams, who has stopped her on each of the past 18 occasions they have played. But it is true that Brand Maria, if not the player, remains impossible to subdue.
All week, the 30-year-old Sharapova has been shuttling between Manhattan's morning shows, not to offer contrition or even regret at her doping suspension, but to parade herself as the injured party.
She is nothing if not consistent
Asked about those scornful of her return after a 15-month ban for taking meldonium, a prescription heart drug - and there are many, including Eugenie Bouchard, Caroline Wozniacki, even Andy Murray - Sharapova bristles. "I don't think it's for them to have an opinion, really, because they don't have the facts. Those are the types of words that make headlines, and they'll be used as headlines."
Classic Sharapova: a choreographed list of no information, all delivered with a turn-of-the-heel hauteur. She is nothing if not consistent.
This icily aloof high school prom-queen act has been perfected since she was 13, a mere wannabe among many at Nick Bollettieri's Florida academy.Even then, according to her book, she disdained the idea of receiving fellow boarder Anna Kournikova's cast-offs, claiming that she hated leopard-skin leggings.
If Sharapova wants facts, then let us reacquaint her with a few. For 10 years, she took meldonium, a substance that she depicts as run-of-the-mill, over-the-counter stuff in Russia, her country of birth.Straight away, this begs questions. If the Latvian-manufactured Mildronate, to use its trade name, was so innocuous, why did she not declare it on her anti-doping forms?
Why could her American family doctor not find one of the vast number of alternative substances approved by the US Food and Drug Administration?
Why, if her condition of an irregular heartbeat is a chronic one, does she refuse to clarify what, if anything, she is taking to counter it now that meldonium is on the banned list?
Still this most unrepentant of divas persists in the sacrificial-lamb act, trying to win back public affection not with penance but with a battering ram of hubris. Her abiding motivation from this day forward, she declares, is to make her detractors "eat their words".
Too late, Maria. You are tainted goods. - © The Daily Telegraph, London..