'Thought she'd like them': Grigor Dimitrov on awkward run-in with Maria Sharapova
Grigor Dimitrov has spoken about his funny encounter with Maria Sharapova at the Kooyong Classic, saying the former lovers still get on well.
The tennis stars were in a relationship between 2013 and 2015, but things didn’t work out.
However there doesn’t seem to be any animosity judging by their encounter on Tuesday.
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Sharapova joined the SBS commentary team while Dimitrov was on court in Melbourne, and Dimitrov spotted her in the box.
“He keeps looking over here, can you tell him to stop looking?” Sharapova said in jest.
Dimitrov then walked over to the box and took a pair of headphones so he could hear what was being said.
“What about this yellow thing going on?” Sharapova asked Dimitrov about his bright shorts, before saying “not really” when he asked if she liked them.
“I thought you liked yellow on me but that’s okay,” Dimitrov replied. “People change, I get it.”
On Thursday Dimitrov said he was surprised that the cheeky moment had become such a talking point.
“I’m usually staying away from social media one week prior (to a grand slam), but now that you say that, that’s cool,” Dimitrov said.
“She’s great and we have fun. I really actually thought she’d like my yellow shorts, but that’s OK.”
Why Sharapova and Dimitrov didn’t work out
Sharapova recently opened up about why things didn’t work out with Dimitrov, saying it was simply bad timing.
“Grigor recently told me...that one of the worst things in life is when you have the right thing at the wrong time,” she wrote in her autobiography released in 2017.
“It made me think of an evening we spent before the 2015 Wimbledon tournament. He pulled out a book that Wimbledon puts together of previous championships.
“He quietly flipped through the pages of the book until he found a picture of me, in his box, watching his match. He looked at me, sad — I thought I saw tears in his eyes — ‘Did you see this? This means everything to me. Seeing you in my box next to my mother.’
“It was then, at that moment, that the emotional pull I had been fighting came to an end. I knew, and so did he, that I couldn’t be that person at this time of my life.
“I was supposed to be focused, getting prepared for my own matches, my own triumphs and defeats, on the largest stage of my career.
“I had been watching his match that day only because I’d lost early at those championships. So his good memory was my bad memory. What meant everything to him happened only because I had lost.”
