The World Athletics choice for 2024 Athlete of the Year

This year World Athletics decided to surprise us by nominating not just 10 candidates  (10 women and 10 men, that is) for the title of the Athlete of the Year. In fact, instead of presenting a list where all disciplines are mixed they started by presenting the list of nominees for Field events, followed by that for Track and later by the  ones dubbed "Out of Stadium".  Given the way they have formulated the presentation of the nominees, we can expect an Athlete of the Year trophy for each of the three specialties. 

Here is the list of the Field athletes 

Valarie Allman
Tara Davis-Woodhall
Nina Kennedy
Yaroslava Mahuchikh
Nafissatou Thiam
Ryan Crouser
Jordan Alejandro Diaz Fortun
Mondo Duplantis
Ethan Katzberg
Miltiadis Tentoglou

All 10 field nominees figure in my list of 13 best (but some of my list like Tamberi and LaFond do,not figure among the World Athletics nominees).

Curiously, for the Track nominees, World Athletics presented a list of 6+6.

Julien Alfred
Beatrice Chebet
Faith Kipyegon
Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone
Marileidy Paulino
Gabby Thomas
Rai Benjamin
Grant Holloway
Jakob Ingebrigtsen
Noah Lyles
Letsile Tebogo
Emmanuel Wanyonyi

G. Thomas is not part of my list but only barely so. In fact I am mentioning her when I write about J. Alfred. In the case of the men's list two names are absent from mine: N. Lyles and E. Wanyonyi. For Lyles the reason I had not included him has to do with the excess of hype before the Games. Nobody was talking about anything else but Lyles, so I got fed up. Wanyonyi was left out of my list for a different reason, but revealing it would be a spoiler for a near-future post, so I'll pass. K. Hodgkinson of my list is not among the WA nominees but she figures among the finalists for the European title.

I felt that it would be too long to wait till WA published their "out of stadium" list, where there will certainly figure olympic champion S. Hassan and world record holder R. Chepngetich. So, I decided to publish this post right after the track and field lists of World Athletics were made public and will, if necessary, add a postscriptum once the "out of stadium" nominees are known.