A quartet of swimmers are up for the AIPS Male and Female Athletes of the Year awards as given out by the International Sports Press Association.
On the men’s side, Michael Phelps is the only swimmer nominated. At age 31, he led all male swimmers with 6 total medals in Rio, 5 of them gold. Phelps wrapped up his swimming career in August as the most-decorated Olympian of all-time. He’s won 23 Olympic golds, 28 total medals and became the first man ever to win four Olympic golds in a row in the same event, doing so in the 200 IM.
On the women’s side, Katinka Hosszu, Katie Ledecky and Sarah Sjostrom are all nominated. Hosszu won 4 of Hungary’s 7 total swimming medals, including all 3 golds. She also set an astounding world record in the 400 IM, blowing out the previous fastest time in the world by two seconds.
Ledecky completed a sweep of the 200, 400 and 800 freestyles, a feat that hadn’t been accomplished since 1968 on the women’s side. She won 4 golds and 1 silver to lead all female swimmers and set a new record for best medal haul by a female athlete at a single Olympic Games. Ledecky also set world records in the 400 and 800 frees and helped the U.S. win silver in the 4×100 free relay in a show of her range.
Sjostrom won a gold, a silver and a bronze for Sweden, representing all of her country’s swimming medals from Rio. Her 100 fly was a new world record, and she pushed Ledecky in a stellar 200 free showdown that ended in a Sjostrom silver. Sjostrom was also third in the 100 free, beating out world record-holder Cate Campbell.
The AIPS will collect poll results from press members this week, with polls closing on Wednesday night. You can view the full list of nominees here.
One more swimming-related item up for an award: the press facilities at the European Championships in London are up for the “Best Press Facilities” award.
I’ve just remarked that Hosszu is almost never mentioned in any best athlete of the year award rankings we comment for a few days. Maybe unfair but I think the doping suspicion is the main reason.
Has anybody actually looked at this “astounding world record in the 400 IM”. With first 200 (her favorite strokes) staying practically unchanged she improved the second 200 by 5(!) seconds since Kazan last year.
Can you imagine a swimmer who has rank #95 at 200 free in 2015 to win Olympic gold medal next year. Or can you picture Katie Ledecky or Sarah Sjostrom to swim suddenly under 1:50 ?
May be her technique at breast stroke or freestyle get so much improved that explains such a huge unbelievable drop. No. Her 200IM doesn’t reflect any such changes. She actually became visibly slower at this race. So what was this secret force that propel her at such speed… Read more »
400IM -first day of Olympics, last day of World Champs
200IM- middle of Olympics, first day of World Champs
in other words what you are saying is that either there was some short lived substance of natural or artificial origin in her system before meet or her body get trashed so quickly that her performance declines exponentially within few days.
Such fast tiredness is a good explanation in the case of ninety years old swimmer like me but it is not good for the first class “iron” swimmer as Katinka Hosszu claims to be. We have a plenty of examples of multi-races meet swimmers at this Olympics who maintained the great form to the very end of the meet: Ledecky, DiRado, Sjostrom, Murphy, Oleksiak – you name it.
Katinka Hosszu, 400IM
Kazan
2:08.00 (1:01.15 – 1:06.85)… Read more »