Serena Williams is Sports Illustrated’s Sportsperson of the Year – the first female athlete honoured by the magazine in more than 30 years. Williams was the favorite to win and was contending to become the first player to sweep all four majors in the same year since Steffi Graf in 1988. She has been able to win three Grand Slam titles in one year, making it a total of 21.
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Williams didn’t get almost as much of the vote as American Pharoah, but it looks like popularity amongst Sports Illustrated readers was not the only thing taken into consideration in awarding the title.
Although a number of Twitter users questioned Williams’ magazine cover, “Scandal” star Kerry Washington praised the tennis champion for slaying the cover. Now J.K. Rowling was tweeting against a critic of Williams’s body, than Oprah was hustling to watch her at the U.S. Open, and Stewart was calling Williams “the most powerful woman I know”.
It was a decisive decision for the Sports Illustrated staff to choose her, as reported by the publication itself.
Read the Sports Illustrated special on Serena Williams here.
“As I always say, it takes a village it’s not just one person“, she said.
“This year was spectacular for me”, she wrote.
American Pharoah won horse racing’s triple crown, and that doesn’t happen often. “I am beyond honored”. The most recent tennis player before Williams was Arthur Ashe in 1992 and the first tennis player to win the award was Billie Jean King in 1972, when she split the honor with UCLA basketball coach John Wooden.
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Williams was selected over athletes, a team, and even a horse, as Simone Biles, Usain Bolt, Steph Curry, Thomas Davis, Novak Djokovic, Carli Lloyd, Lionel Messi, American Pharoah, Ronda Rousey, the Kansas City Royals, and Jordan Spieth were all candidates to land the honor.
