The World Athletics year's best list

World Athletics published its list of the best athletes of the year, and I must say that I am somewhat perplexed.

But first, let me give the list. Here are the 10 best women (in alphabetical order):

Tigst Assefa
Chase Jackson
Melissa Jefferson-Wooden
Agnes Ngetich
Marileidy Paulino
María Pérez
Camryn Rogers
Masai Russell
Audrey Werro
Yan Ziyi

And the 10 best men:

Kenneth Bednarek
Kristjan Čeh
Andy Díaz Hernández
Alison dos Santos
Mondo Duplantis
Collen Kebinatshipi
Josh Kerr
Rumesh Tharanga Pathirage
Sabastian Sawe
Ja’Kobe Tharp

A. Ngetich was not among my choices, but I really hesitated before leaving Andy Díaz out of a list that was becoming really long. On the other hand my list contains athletes like F. Cherotich and G.Tamberi, to name but a few, who should have figured in the World Athletics list. I cannot understand how an athlete like Tamberi was left out. 

When I counted the specialties, I ended up with 4 track, 3 field and 3 out-of-stadium women. But for the men, there were 5 track, 4 field and just 1 out-of-stadium athlete. So it is impossible to designate the three best male athletes for the out-of-stadium specialty. Thus, I tried to parse the blurb accompanying the article.

It says:

A ... vote, which closes on Saturday 17 October at midnight CEST, will now determine their [i.e. the 10 athletes for each sex] final ranking, from first to 10th.

And further on:

The six finalists – three for the women’s World Athlete of the Year award and three for the men’s – will be announced on 10 and 11 November and be invited to Monaco for the World Athletics Awards on 29 November, when each winner will be announced live on stage.

So, the only possible explanation is that the specialty classification of the last two years will be abandoned and we are going back to the old format, where one “overall best” is selected. Unfortunately, not being privy to the confidence of Lord Sebastian, I can only establish my list based on last year’s criteria. And this encourages me further in the direction I was speculating about in my previous post: give a discipline-by-discipline report of the year and simply present the names of the three best female and male athletes.

PS. At the end of the WA article is a cryptic announcement: among the awards presented on stage, there will be, for the first time, the Moment of the Year award. I really wonder what that will be. But I guess we only have to wait until the end of November.