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.)
