Russian tennis star Maria Sharapova has announced a split from fiancé and basketball player Sasha Vujacic, saying she saw too little of him when he switched from the NBA to the Turkish league.
Ever since the athletes got engaged in 2010, the world has waited with bated breath for them to name the day.
But Sharapova revealed the pair had stopped seeing each other in the spring.
"It's been since the end of spring actually. I was waiting for someone to actually ask me that question, but nobody did directly," Sharapova said in an interview posted on her personal website.
"It was obviously a challenging decision, you know, from both of our ends. Yeah, it was a really nice period of time for both of us, but, you know, our career schedules just made it extremely difficult to see each other with the traveling, and especially his career move to Turkey," she said.
Vujacic and Sharapova hooked up when the Slovenian was plying his trade in the NBA with the L.A. Lakers. After a year with the New Jersey Nets, Vujacic switched to Turkish team Anadolu Efes, based in Istanbul.
It was then that things turned difficult, Sharapova said.
"He wasn't home one time during the ten months that he was in Turkey, so that made it extremely difficult. ... But we have a tremendous amount of respect for each other. Still would love to call him as a friend. Yeah, we spent really great years together."
Sharapova defended her silence on the issue since, but the opportunities were there.
In August, Sharapova was asked whether the wedding would take place in Istanbul, and answered "definitely not."
On Tuesday, she said she had feared she was pregnant after contracting what turned out to be a stomach bug.
"I'm not an announcer, you know. I don't go and do interviews about it or photo ops," she said in the interview, conducted on the sidelines of the U.S. Open.
Sharapova, 25, reached the fourth round on Friday by thrashing U.S. wildcard Mallory Burdette 6-1, 6-1.
