Tennis: Sharapova Swept Into Last 16 in Paris

Maria Sharapova accumulated an enormous fortune since winning Wimbledon last year - she is now the world's highest- earning sportswoman - but the price has been high: there's the cost of bodyguards for a start.

At the French Open yesterday, having eased past her compatriot Anna Chakvetadze to reach the last 16, the Russian teenager with the Floridian accent, tan and deportment spent almost as long in the press room, where it was mercifully cooler than outside, as she had out on court. Most interestingly, she discoursed on fame and what was the hardest part to deal with. 'Walking around with a few more bodyguards,' she said. 'I usually don't like to walk around with people that have to protect me, but now it's just become normal.

'I've always been a pretty independent person and when you have too many people around you, it isn't really comfortable. I don't like it when the bodyguards have to push people away from me to walk. At the beginning I felt like I was too much of a prima donna, but you just have to realise it's part of the game, it's for your own protection.'

Her match against Chakvetadze was the millionairess against the relative pauper, both in respect of their play - Sharapova sailed home 6-1 6-4 - and their bank balances. Since winning Wimbledon, Sharapova has become seriously wealthy. An 18-year-old with the 'It' factor - as in she's got what it takes to sell a brand - her annual reimbursement for product endorsement is now an estimated $22.5 million.

The figure has swept her past Serena Williams, who a year ago seemed untouchable as the premier endorser in women's tennis, but whose $15m a year now looks a little puny. Cars, mobile phone games, handbags and perfume are just a few of the products that apparently benefit from the Sharapova imprimatur. The perfume is the one of which she's the most proud, 'because it's mine and it's inspired by me and my name is on the box. The whole thing is mine.' Calm down, dear, it's only an advert.

Sharapova may not go all the way to the title here, because she readily admits that clay is her least favourite surface. But you have to admire the tenacity with which she is sticking to her task, particularly when it's probably the case that the shops and arcades of Paris' 8th arrondissement , which lie a short chauffeur-driven journey to the east of Roland Garros, offer a more appealing prospect than playing dirt-ball tennis.

'If you hit flat balls on clay as I do, they keep coming back,' said the number two seed, although, on another piping-hot day, the heavily outgunned Chakvetadze failed to muster much in the way of return fire.

The match was done and only lightly dusted in 74 minutes, Sharapova's serve yielding only three points once she had wrapped up the first set which, despite the scoreline, was more competitive than the second. The crowd tried to rally Chakvetadze with cries of 'Allez Anna', but what she really needed was a bit more whack in her racket.

If the US-raised Sharapova dislikes clay, Justine Henin-Hardenne, the 2003 champion here, has a European's affinity with it. Restored to something close to full health after being felled by an enervating viral illness last year, Henin-Hardenne took what, for her, is not an untypical route to victory: play yourself into a crisis and then blaze your way out of it. The Belgian lost the first five games against Spain's Anabel Medina Garrigues, but won the match 4-6 6-2 6-3.

Is there a finer, more frosty-eyed competitor in any sport than Henin-Hardenne? She agrees she is better at closing out matches than most. 'You have it or you don't have it,' she said. 'It's very hard for a coach to teach that to a player. You have to feel it.' Tuesday's likely quarter-final between Henin-Hardenne and Sharapova is likely to be as good a match as any in the fortnight.

To judge from local press coverage of the coming fiftieth anniversary of the death of James Dean, Parisians are not above admiring young American heroes - so even they might be feeling a little bereft that, for the second year running, US interest in the men's draw ended after only four days.

The only guys still hustling their way to the title are Europeans or Latin Americans, including the hugely impressive Spaniard Rafael Nadal. He will be 19 on Friday (the day of his projected semi-final against world number one Roger Federer), but already he has the physique of someone at least five years older and the tennis brain of a veteran.

And finally... yes, that match did receive a mention at the tennis and caused a little confusion when Venus Williams, who played in Istanbul last week, found herself fielding a somewhat convoluted question. She was asked about 'the huge soccer match' that was played in the Turkish city that has been 'a meeting ground of cultures' and, 'Looking at it as a meeting ground of east and west, were you touched?'

'I don't understand the question,' said Venus, explicably nonplussed.