Maria Sharapova @ Roland Garros 8678
photo by Johan Le Bail197
Stade de Roland Garros ("Roland Garros Stadium") is a tennis venue located in Paris, France. It hosts the French Open tennis tournament (known as the Roland Garros Tournament within France), a Grand Slam event played annually in May and June. The facility was constructed in 1928 to host France's first defense of the Davis Cup. It is named for Roland Garros, a pioneer aviator (completed the first solo flight across the Mediterranean Sea), engineer (inventor of the first forward-firing aircraft machine gun), and World War I hero (the first pilot to shoot down five enemy aircraft, and to be called an "ace" for doing so), who was killed in aerial combat in 1918.
The 21-acre (8.5-hectare) complex contains twenty courts, including three large-capacity stadiums; Les Jardins de Roland-Garros, a large restaurant and bar complex; Le Village, the press and VIP area; France's National Training Centre (CNE); and the Tenniseum, a bilingual, multimedia museum of the history of tennis.
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Maria Yuryevna Sharapova ( Мари́я Ю́рьевна Шара́пова (help·info); born April 19, 1987) is a Russian professional tennis player who as of May 27, 2013 is ranked World No. 2 by the Women's Tennis Association (WTA) and is the top Russian player and the only one in the top 10. A United States resident since 1994, Sharapova has won twenty-nine WTA singles titles, including four Grand Slam singles titles. She has also won the year-end WTA Tour Championships in 2004. The WTA has ranked Sharapova World No. 1 in singles on five separate occasions, for a total of 21 weeks. She became the world no. 1 for the first time on August 22, 2005, and last held the ranking for the fifth time for four weeks from June 11, 2012 to July 8, 2012. She has been in seven Grand Slam finals with a record of 4–3.
Sharapova made her professional breakthrough in 2004 at age 17, when she defeated two-time defending champion and top seed Serena Williams in the 2004 Wimbledon final for her first Grand Slam singles title. She entered the top 10 of the WTA Rankings with the win. The world no. 1 ranking followed in 2005, along with subsequent major titles at the 2006 US Open and 2008 Australian Open, before she was forced out of the game for ten months by a recurring shoulder injury, which ultimately required surgery in October 2008. Sharapova returned to the game in May 2009, returning to the top 10 in March 2011 and capturing her fourth Grand Slam title at the 2012 French Open. By doing so, she became the sixth woman in the Open Era to complete the career Grand Slam in singles. In the same year, she won an Olympic silver medal in the London 2012 Olympics.
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