The captain of the Argentina soccer team and PSG player, Lionel Messi, Together with the team led by Lionel Scaloni after the world title achieved in Qatar 2022, they are among the nominees for the 2023 Laureus World Sports Awards, after a vote carried out by sports media from around the world.
Laureus announced this Monday the names of the candidates for its different distinctions, whose winners will be revealed after the vote by the jury of its Academy, made up of 71 of the greatest sports legends of all time.
Messi will compete for the best sportsman of the year award after leading Argentina to the world title, the only one that had resisted him until last December, and will have as opponents his PSG teammate Kylian Mbappé, runner-up in the world in Qatar 2022, and the Spanish tennis player Rafa Nadal, who after winning the Australian Open and Roland Garros in 2022 added 22 Grand Slam victories.
???? Take a look at the full list of Nominees for the Laureus World Sports Awards 2023.
???? Who should the Laureus World Sports Academy Members select as the final Award winners?#Laureus23 pic.twitter.com/lwWLD2evo8
— Laureus (@LaureusSport) February 20, 2023
The list of candidates for best athlete in the men’s category is completed by Belgian Max Verstappen, two-time Formula 1 world champion, Swedish Mondo Duplantis, pole vault world record holder, and American Stephen Curry, MVP of the NBA finals.
Argentina doubles its presence in the candidacies with that of its soccer team among the candidates for the best team; that joins Real Madrid, league champion and winner of the Champions League for the fourteenth time in 2022; the England women’s team, winner of the last European Championship; the French men’s rugby team, who won the Six Nations after twelve years; Golden State Warriors (USA), NBA champion for the fourth time in eight years, and the Oracle Red Bull Racing team (Austria), which became the constructors’ champion after beating Mercedes after eight years.
In the women’s category, the Spanish soccer player and Barcelona captain, Alexia Putellas, is nominated again after winning her second Ballon d’Or in a row and after a great season in which her club won all 30 league games, she was runner-up in the Champions League and top scorer with 11 goals, although a cruciate ligament injury prevented her from participating in the Euro Cup.
Putellas will face in the final vote the Jamaican athlete Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, winner for the fifth time at the World Championships in Eugene (USA) of gold in the 100-meter dash, and the American Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, world record holder of 400 meters fences; the Polish tennis player Iga Swiatek, number one in the world, the American swimmer Katie Ledecky, winner of four gold medals in the World Cups, and her compatriot Mikaela Shiffrin, winner of the Ski World Cup.
The award for the revelation athlete includes among its candidates the Spanish tennis player Carlos Alcaraz, after winning the US Open and becoming the youngest male world number 1 in history, at 19 years, 4 months and 6 days.
The other applicants are the Nigerian athlete Tobi Amusan, world champion and new world record of 100 meters hurdles; American skater Nathan Chen, Olympic gold medalist and world record holder in the short program, Morocco’s soccer team, the first African country to reach the World Cup semifinals, Kazakh tennis player Elena Rybakina, winner of Wimbledon, who won her first “Grand Slam” ”, and the American golfer Scottie Scheffler, winner of the Augusta Open and second in the US Open.
The Laureus awards will also honor the comeback of the year, with the American golfer Tiger Woods and the Danish soccer player Christian Eriksen among their contenders. The former returned to play in the Masters 14 months after a serious car accident and the latter returned after suffering a cardiac arrest on the field during a Euro 2020 match with his team.
The six nominees in each category are chosen by a vote of the Media Nomination Panel, made up of 1,400 of the world’s leading sports journalists, except in the categories of athlete with a disability and the sport ‘for good’ award, which are chosen by specialist panels.