'Masha' was a star at four

There are few possessions in Galina Sharapova's cramped, Soviet-era flat, and none is as highly treasured as her faded and battered photograph album. With immense care, she took from its well-thumbed pages a selection of small prints, all showing a beautiful child.

There is something haunting and strangely familiar about the little girl's smile, indeed, it is a smile that has come to captivate the world. Galina is the grandmother of Maria Sharapova, the 17-year-old whose combination of cool beauty and fiery tennis has been the sensation of Wimbledon.

When the Russian teenager steps out on Centre Court to face Serena Williams tomorrow she will be hailed a sporting superstar - win or lose. If she is not already a millionairess, she will be soon. Ahead of her lies a career of dazzling promise and a future of enormous celebrity and riches.

Yet, as she watches on her tiny television in the grim town of Gomel, in Belarus, the flat stretch of land between Poland and Russia, grandmother Galina will probably be thinking more about the past. This rotund, kindly old woman - the very model of a Russian babushka - knows better than anyone that things could have been so very different.

Maria - or Masha, as she is known to her family - escaped from the shadow of Chernobyl, the nuclear catastrophe that, in 1986, blighted a generation.

"She was conceived here in Gomel," Galina, now 63, said. "Her parents - my son Yuri and his wife Yelena - lived here with me and we were so afraid for the unborn child. The accident happened the year before she was born and we are so close to the Chernobyl plant. Even when she was still in the womb, we decided her parents should move."

Yuri was in his mid-twenties and the family had little money. But he and Yelena were determined that their child would not fall victim to the cancers and radiation-induced illnesses that were decimating the young populations of towns and villages which lay, like Gomel, in the path of the Chernobyl fallout.

Even now, young people of Maria's age are falling victim to serious illnesses linked to Chernobyl. In Gomel and neighbouring towns in Belarus the rate of thyroid cancer among teenagers is among the highest in the world.

But Yuri and Yelena paid a high price to escape these dangers. The only move open to them, during those dying years of the Soviet empire, was to a bleak, industrial town in Western Siberia, Nyagan. Here, where winter temperatures plummet to -40C and clouds of toxic smoke hang over the town, pumped out from mile after mile of oil and gas refineries, life is harsh.

Maria's father worked in the nearby Tyumen oilfields, earning extra money because the conditions were so brutal. In four years he had saved enough to escape again, this time to the resort town of Sochi on the Black Sea. This is where the tennis phenomenon that the world knows as Maria Sharapova was born.

Veteran Russian coach, 67-year-old Yuri Yutkin, recalled that, as a four-year-old, Maria would be taken to watch her father play tennis: "She got bored watching and one day, by chance, I noticed her pick up a racket and start to hit balls around." What Yutkin saw astonished him. The tiny child, not much bigger than the racket she was holding, displayed an amazing precocity. Her hand-eye co-ordination was exceptional. Yutkin offered to coach her.

There was just one problem. At that time, as the Soviet regime crumbled, there were widespread shortages, and a child's tennis racket just could not be obtained. So the four-year-old Sharapova began to learn the game with an adult's racket with a sawn-off handle. By the time she was six, Yutkin said, he believed she was a champion in the making.

Galina takes up the story of her gifted granddaughter. As people flocked to watch the little girl play tennis, word spread fast. The Russian tennis star Yevgeny Kafelnikov heard of the young prodigy - and swiftly found a correctly-sized racket for her. When she was seven, Yutkin and her father took her to a tournament in Moscow.

All who saw her were enthralled, Galina said, and no one was more impressed than Martina Navratilova. She urged Maria's father to take the child to the celebrated Nick Bollettieri tennis academy in Florida.

But where, Galina said, was the money to come from? At that time she earned a meagre wage as a food shop manager; now she subsists on a pension of £8.30 a week. "It was hard," she said. "To find the money to go to America seemed impossible."

Against all the odds, Yuri did raise the money. Galina said: "He borrowed it. It was the only way." It was a very risky thing to do. If the trip to America did not succeed, he would have to return to face the prospect of working for years to pay off the debt.

It was a terrible time, Galina recalled; there was just enough money for Maria to travel with her father. Yelena, her mother, would have to stay at home in Russia. Galina cried as she had never cried before when she went to Moscow to bid them farewell.

"I watched little Maria getting ready to go to bed the night before they left. We were all so nervous, but she was so organised, folding her clothes neatly on the chair. It was as if she was preparing for her destiny."

Maria had always been close to her father, Galina said, but as they boarded the plane together, their adventures were to create a near-supernatural bond.

They arrived in Miami at midnight. They had $700. Bollettieri enrolled her in his school, and, while her father looked for part-time labouring jobs to support them, she immersed herself in tennis. It would be two years before Yuri had saved enough money to send for his wife to join them in Florida, now the family home.

Inevitably, perhaps, Maria soon found herself being compared to the Russian tennis-playing beauty, Anna Kournikova.

Bolletieri thinks such comparisons may be wide of the mark: "She has more firepower and a different mentality than Anna," he said. "She could bend a steel nail, she's so tough."

As she grunts, slaps her thigh and narrows her eyes in deep concentration at Wimbledon, this toughness has shown through. So, too, has the exceptional closeness to her 42-year-old father. In her match against the Japanese champion, Ai Sugiyama, Maria was beginning to struggle.

Then, in the third set, her father moved to the Players' Box, closer to the play. Maria's game seemed to lift, almost instantly. She went on to win.

When she beat Lindsay Davenport in the semi-final, her father leapt to his feet, arms thrown above his head in triumph. But some have wondered whether he plays an excessively dominant role in his daughter's life. Last year, security guards intervened in an argument he had with the coach of her opponent Nadia Petrova during a tournament in California.

Maria is the first to defend him: "Why would you say that my dad is too involved in my tennis?", she asked indignantly. "He has done everything for me in my life. He hasn't missed one day in my practice court. I believe in him so much and I love him!" She added quickly: "And my mum, too."

Tracy Austin, a teenage tennis sensation herself in the Seventies, is one of Maria's closest friends. She said while Yuri Sharapova is "very involved" in his daughter's tennis, his wife doesn't travel with them, but helps Maria with her education which she receives online, through the Keystone National High School. Before she faced Lindsay Davenport on Centre Court, she wrote a sociology essay.

"Some kids have everything so easy, you have to ask where is the drive going to come from?" Ms Austin said. "But Maria's background has definitely contributed to her determination on the court. Talk about having the will and drive to win!"

Despite securing a modelling contract, and suggestions that she could make a successful career as a pop star, Maria says she is determined to be a tennis champion.

"She often phones me to tell me about her life," grandmother Galina said. "She is not like Anna Kournikova, who is now a model rather than a sportswoman. For Masha, tennis is what really matters. Her goal is to be a winner. She has no time for a love life - I'm sure I would know if there was a boyfriend.

"She just wants to be the best."

Additional reporting by Clair Weaver