Sharapova’s Chernobyl experience
In her first interview about the impact the calamity at the nuclear power station has had on her family’s history, she spoke of how she could very easily have been among the victims. “When I look back at what happened, I just think, ‘Oh, my God, I just can’t believe it. I feel so lucky that I got out of it, that I got out of there.’ So many people didn’t get out of it. I am lucky to be alive and well,” she said.
Sharapova disclosed that the key to her coming through unharmed could have been the action taken by her parents, Yuri and Yelena. In the months after the reactor exploded in April 1986, which is said to have thrown out contamination equivalent to more than 100 medium-sized atomic bombs, Sharapova’s parents were living in Gomel in Belarus, 128 kilometres north of Chernobyl. Sharapova’s mother was pregnant with her at the time, and was fretting about what the toxic fallout could do to her unborn daughter.
And so they fled Belarus and moved to Siberia, where temperatures in winter can drop to minus-40 degrees, one of only a few places to which the then-poor Sharapova family could afford to move. It was there, in the town of Nyagan, that Sharapova, a thankfully healthy child and a future Wimbledon champion and world No.1, was born in April 1987. “I still talk to my mother about that, it pops up in conversation from time to time,” Sharapova, 19, said. “She has told me that she was really worried about the radiation possibly affecting me before I was born, and about all the possible illnesses and cancers.”
SMH