Usain Bolt.
Runners-up: Cliff Lee, YE Yang, Albert Pujols
Bolt joins the previous 7 winners (Fitzgerald, Holmes, Moore, James, Messi, Federer, Buehrle) in the race to be Athlete of the Year.
And that will lead to the Athlete of the Decade Award (note, of course we end the decade here, otherwise when we talk about the 1990s, we wouldn't include 1990. 90s were 90-99. So this decade is 2000-09. It's not math. It's culture. Read Stephen Jay Gould.).
Your nominees:
Tiger Woods, Barry Bonds, Lance Armstrong, Peyton Manning, Reggie Bush, Roger Federer, Tom Brady, Usain Bolt, and whomever wins this year. Athlete of the Decade! Fun to do. (yes, I know Reggie Bush, for example, isn't one of the ten best athletes of this decade; these are my athletes of the year for each year of the decade)
Your Athlete of the Decade for the 90s was Michael Jordan. Shockingly enough. Runners up were Joe Montana, Mario Lemieux, George Foreman, Hakeem Olajuwon, Tiger Woods, Mark McGwire (again, see above.)
(I didn't do this every week in the 80s, so there's no official Blog of Revelation Athlete of the Decade, but it would have been Gretzky. If I could get a do over, I'd reconsider that Foreman win in '94, as has been noted, I have no soccer players as my athletes of the year, and Romario was my athlete of the month for July of '94 - also, the absence of Jerry Rice, who was athlete of the month for September of '94, is bonkers. Fortunately there's no counterfactual for my athlete of the month choices, no I won't do one. I picked who I picked and we're moving on with our lives. You're lucky I haven't ranked Big Brother seasons or every episode of Arrested Development. Maybe when the movie comes out. No, I don't know why I'm like this.)
2 comments
The thing about ranking soccer players as Athlete of the Month is that it's a really hard thing to do. It's maybe more of a team game than any other team sport in the world. Separating the individual from that team is a difficult thing. And when it happens, it generally has to happen when his team has won something so, realistically, it can only ever occur in May or June of any year.
This is almost certainly why certain soccer teams from specific eras are lauded more than individuals, i.e. The Brazil 1970 team, Holland in 1974, Real Madrid of the late '50s, Liverpool in the late '70s and early '80s, AC Milan in the late '80s and early '90s. All of them hold a reverence beyond that of individuals.
With the possible exception of Pele and Diego Maradona.
Maradona was the athlete of the 1980s, Jim. I respect the Blog of Revelation's eternal rightness but he just was. It was a decade of the most gifted footballer of all-time at his perfect best. Trust me on this issue. I know stuff.
All of that applies to Gretzky too though. And the distance between Gretzky and everyone who had gone before is pretty wide.
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