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Maria Sharapova is expecting her first child. The former tennis player is engaged to Alexander Gilkes, and shared the news of their pregnancy over social media.
Sharapova shared a photo over her Instagram on her birthday. The photo features her on the beach, proudly showing off her pregnant belly, wearing a bathing suit top and some comfortable pants. “Precious beginnings!!!,” she wrote. “Eating birthday cake for two has always been my specialty.”
Sharapova has been dating her fiance Alexander Gilkes since 2018. The two carried out their relationship discreetly, making a splash in the 2019 Met Gala red carpet. She announced their engagement via Instagram in December of 2020, in a post containing a variety of images of the two looking happy and in love. “I said yes from the first day we met. This was our little secret, wasn’t it,” she captioned the post.
While the two have been engaged for some time now, they’ve kept the details of their wedding under wraps. In an interview with MSN, Sharapova explained that their long engagement was influenced by the pandemic. “We actually haven't discussed it yet because we want our friends and family to be comfortable in an environment and not feel like they have to attend something,” she said.
Alexander Gilkes is a businessman who’s worked on a variety of prestigious businesses and has worked as an auctioneer for different foundations, including Madonna’s Raising Malawi and Elton John’s AIDS Foundation.
For her part, Sharapova has been enjoying her retirement from tennis, which she announced in an emotional statement via Vanity Fair. “How do you leave behind the only life you've ever known? How do you walk away from the courts you've trained on since you were a little girl, the game that you love,” she wrote. “I’m new to this, so please forgive me. Tennis – I'm saying goodbye.”