Sifan Hassan facing tough competition in BBC World Sports Personality of the Year award
Sifan Hassan is one of several highly prestigious athletes who are nominated for the BBC World Sports Personality of the Year award. Other nominees include US Olympic gold medalist Simone Biles, Basketball player Caitlin Clark, and Armand Duplantis, who broke the Olympic and world record in pole vaulting in 2024.
Hassan won three medals at the Olympic Games in Paris last summer. The 31-year-old made history by winning bronze in the 5,000-meter and 10,000-meter run before also picking up gold in the marathon on the last day of the games.
This made her the first woman to win Olympic gold in all three of these events after she had won three medals in the games in Tokyo in 2021. And the first athlete since 1952 to win a medal in three races at the same games.
Hassan was the first Dutch athlete in history to be named the best athlete in the world by the World Athletics Organization on Sunday.
One of the contenders for the award is Simone Biles, a gymnast who won three gold medals at the games in Paris after missing many of the events in the previous Olympics due to mental health issues. She became the oldest gymnast to win the woman’s all-round title at 27 years of age last summer.
Many of the contenders are Olympians. Armand Duplantis became the first male pole vaulter to retain his world title at the Olympics since the 1950s last summer. The Swede broke the world record at the Olympics before he broke it again in August.
Leon Marchand, who won four gold medals in Swimming at the summer’s games in his home country, and Catherine Debrunner, a wheelchair racer from Switzerland who won five gold medals at the Paralympics, are the other Olympians to be nominated for the award.
Caitlin Clark, a rookie Basketball sensation in the WNBA, is the only person nominated for the award who did not participate in the Olympic Games. Expectations were high for Clark’s first season in the highest Women’s basketball division, the WNBA after she broke records in college with the Iowa Hawkeyes.
But the 22-year-old exceeded these expectations by breaking the regular season record for assists and points by a rookie. This has also led to a surge in popularity for the WNBA, with record viewing figures being registered in the United States.
The winner of the award will be decided by a public vote. Voting is currently possible via the BBC's website. The winner will be presented with the award on December 17.
