The World Athletics choice of the year's best

World Athletics published their list of the best athletes of the year. As always, some names appear in both my list and the WA one. Of course, my list is based on my preferences and thus subjective. And I am convinced that the one of World Athletics is not totally objective either. Here is the list of the ten best men according to WA. 

Neeraj Chopra
Ryan Crouser
Mondo Duplantis
Soufiane El Bakkali
Jakob Ingebrigtsen
Kelvin Kiptum
Pierce LePage
Noah Lyles
Alvaro Martin
Miltiadis Tentoglou
Karsten Warholm

It is not possible to establish the overlap between the two lists, since this year WA decided to produce a list of 11 instead of the usual 10 (and I for once decided to limit y choice to strictly 10). 

The ones present in my list and absent from the WA one are G. Tamberi, J. Cheptegei and E. Kipchoge. Their place in the WA list is occupied by K. Kiptum, (who established a new and impressive world record in the marathon), S. El Bakkali (the steeple-chase champion), K. Warholm and A. Martin. The latter won the world titles over the 20 and the 35 km race-walking events. Since I do not like this discipline I am not including its protagonists in my year's best list (although I am convinced that they are excellent athletes). The only exception was the inclusion (for obvious reasons) of the greek champion, A. Drisbioti, who won the two titles in last year's Europeans.

And here is the women's list

Tigist Assefa
Femke Bol
Shericka Jackson
Faith Kipyegon
Haruka Kitaguchi
Yaroslava Mahuchikh
Maria Perez
Gudaf Tsegay
Sha’Carri Richardson
Yulimar Rojas
Winfed Yavi

Four athletes of my list, I. Vuleta, K. Nageotte, S. Hassan and P. Jepchirchir are absent from the WA list. The ones present are T. Assefa (who recently established a new world record in the marathon), H. Kitaguchi (javelin world champion, but still far from the performances of the great throwers of the past decades), Y. Rojas (who once more dominated triple jump, but who was, to my eyes, less convincing this year) G. Tsegay (who established a great world record over 5000 m and would appear in my list, had I proposed 11 names) and M. Perez. What I wrote for A. Martin applies also to M. Perez. And in fact these double victories will be addressed in some future post of mine (where, you guessed it, I will be once more criticising race-walking).

The five finalists will be announced on November 13-14. I do not know if I will publish a special article in order to give the finalists list. Perhaps I will just amend this post putting a star next to the five chosen names, in which case, if you wish to keep abreast of the selection process, please revisit this post in mid-November.