MADRID, 24 Abr. (EUROPA PRESS) –
Alexia Putellas, FC Barcelona Femenino, Susana Rodríguez, Pedri González, Marc Márquez and Alberto Ginés are the Spanish athletes who this Sunday aspire to win one of the Laureus Awards 2022, in a virtual ceremony presented by skier Lindsey Vonn and held from Seville (8 pm).
The national sport will see its good work rewarded in the past year 2021 with presence in six of the seven main categories, and only will not have representation for the election of the ‘Best Athlete’, an award for which the Serbian Novak Djokovic (tennis), the Americans Tom Brady (NFL) and Caleeb Dressel (swimming), the Kenyan Eliud Kipchoge (athletics), the Dutch Max Verstappen (F-1) and the Polish Robert Lewandowski (soccer).
On the other hand, for the ‘Best Sportsman’, the Catalan midfielder of FC Barcelona and the Spanish team Alexia Putellas has been one of the nominees and will seek to close her prize draw after the Ballon d’Or, ‘The Best’ and the best European player.
Their rivals will be of a high level: the Jamaican athlete Elaine Thompson-Herah, Olympic champion of 100, 200 and the 4×100 relay; Americans Allyson Felix (athletics) and Katie Ledecky (swimming); and the Australians Emma McKeon, winner of seven medals at Tokyo 2020, and Ashleigh Barty, Wimbledon champion and recently retired from the WTA circuit.
Along with Alexia, her club, FC Barcelona Feminine, will also be nominated, which made history with the conquest of the Champions League, a trophy that united the Primera Iberdrola, the Copa de la Reina and the Spanish Super Cup, and which will be among contenders for ‘Best Team’. It will be the only women’s team as the rest of the nominees are the Italian and Argentine soccer teams, the Chinese Olympic trampoline team, the Milwaukee Bucks and the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F-1.
In addition, the Spanish triathlete Susana Rodríguez, Paralympic and world gold in 2021, will also compete for the Laureus for ‘Best Athlete with a Disability’ along with other figures such as the athlete Marcel Hug, the tennis players Shingo Kunieda and Diede De Groot, the cyclist and triathlete Jetze Plat, and cyclist Sarah Storey.
“I am very proud to have been nominated. I feel very humbled when I see the other five nominees with what they have achieved in their sports last year and I am very happy to be in the same group. The last two years have been very difficult. in Spain and I am glad to have been able to help so many people in their recovery”, celebrated the Galician.
In addition, another champion in Tokyo, the Extremaduran Alberto Ginés, gold in climbing, will fight for the award for ‘Best Action Sportsman’, with other golds in the Japanese capital such as Carissa Moore and Ítalo Ferreira, in surfing, Yuto Horigome and Momiji Nishiya , on skateboard; and Bethany Shriever, in BMX.
The young Canarian soccer player Pedri González was among the six final nominees for the ‘Best Breakthrough’, where he will compete with Emma Raducanu (tennis), Daiil Medvedev (tennis), Neeraj Chopra (athletics), Yulimar Rojas (athletics) and Ariarne Titmus (swimming ).
Finally, the presence of Spanish sport at the Laureus Awards is completed by the Spanish Repsol Honda rider Marc Márquez, aspiring to ‘Best Comeback’ as well as the American gymnast Simone Biles, the British cyclist Mark Cavendish, the British springboard jumper Tom Daley , the Dutch cyclist Annemiek van Vleuten and the young British figure skater Sky Brown.
In addition, the nominees for the Laureus Sport for Good, award of a social nature, ‘Ich will da rauf!’ (‘I want to get to the top’), which uses climbing in Munich, ‘Jucà Pe Cagnà’, which offers safe places for young people to practice sports far from the influence of the Camorra criminal organizations, ‘Kick 4 Life’, in Lesotho, a country with the second highest rate of HIV in the world, the ‘Lost Boyz Inc.’, which uses baseball in Chicago, and ‘Monkey Magic’, founded by Japanese para-climbing legend Koichiro Kobayashi.
The winners will be the result of the vote of the Laureus World Sports Academy, which is the supreme sports jury in the world and is made up of 71 of the greatest sports legends of all time.