In 2016 she tested positive for meldonium, a substance added to the banned list at the start of that year, and served a suspension before returning to the tour. She retired in 2020. Through it all she remained one of the highest-earning female athletes in the world for more than a decade, building a commercial presence that extended well beyond tennis, including Sugarpova, a candy brand she founded in 2012 that became a functioning consumer business. That empire had an origin most people don't know: she arrived in Florida at nine years old to train at the Bollettieri academy speaking almost no English, while her father Yuri worked odd jobs around Bradenton to keep her there. The wealth and the name recognition that defined her public image were built on that foundation, by a child in a country not her own, before she had won a single match that anyone outside the academy had seen.

She completed a business program at Harvard while still competing, channeling the same drive that had carried her from Bradenton to Wimbledon into a life she was building in parallel with the one on court. Five majors, a career Grand Slam, nearly two decades as one of the most recognized athletes in the world, a shoulder surgery that should have ended it and didn't. She built one of the most complete records in the history of the sport, and she did it twice.