MADRID, 22 Sep. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Spanish walkers María Pérez and Álvaro Martín, double world champions in the 20 and 35 kilometer walk, are among the ten nominees in their respective categories for ‘Best European Athlete of the Year’, as revealed this Friday by the European Athletics Association.
The Andalusian and the Extremaduran were two of the great protagonists in the World Championships in Budapest last August as they dominated both the 20 and 35 kilometres, signing two extremely difficult doubles. The two walkers also took victory in the 35 km of the European Team Championship, an event in which the Granada woman also achieved the world record for the distance with 2:37:15.
María Pérez’s rivals for this award will be the Dutch Femke Bol and Sifan Hassan, the British Keely Hodgkinson and Katarina Johnson-Thompson, the Polish Natalia Kaczmarek, the Ukrainian Yaroslava Mahuchikh, the Finnish Wilma Murto, the Belgian Nafissatou Thiam and the Serbian Ivana Vuleta.
For their part, the other nine candidates for the male award along with Álvaro Martín are the Swedes Armand Duplantis and Daniel Stahl, the Norwegians Jakob Ingebrigtsen and Karsten Warholm, the British Josh Kerr and Matthew Hudson-Smith, the Italian Gianmarco Tambieri, the Greek Miltiadis Tentoglou and the Polish Wojciech Nowicki.
Voting opened this Friday and will close on all channels on October 2, with the awards being presented on October 21 in Vilnius, Lithuania. According to the European Association, fans can vote through social networks and will represent a quarter of the general vote, while the vote of the Member Federations, the media and the panel of experts each represent a quarter part of the final vote.