Yani Tseng has again been nominated for the US Sports Academy’s female Athlete of the Month award.
The 22-year-old from Taoyuan County, who has now spent 34 straight weeks at the top of the women’s world golf rankings, was nominated for successfully defending her title at the Walmart NW Arkansas Championship in Rogers, Arkansas, last month with a one-hole, sudden-death playoff over Amy Yang. It was Tseng’s fifth LPGA victory of the year.
Tseng was named Female Athlete of the Month for July, which puts her in line for the academy’s Athlete of the Year award, to be chosen in December.
The other female athletes on the ballot are: Tamika Catchings of the US, the WNBA’s MVP for her standout play for the Indiana Fever and the only player in WNBA history with 5,000 points, 2,000 rebounds and 1,000 assists; LaShinda Demus of the US, who shattered a 16-year-old US record in the women’s 400m hurdles by clocking 52.47 seconds at the World Track and Field Championships in Daegu, South Korea; Mary Keitany, a Kenyan who set a new course record of 1 hour, 7 minutes and 54 seconds for a half-marathon race in Lisbon, Portugal; Samantha Stosur, an Australian tennis player who defeated Serena Williams to win the US Open; and Lexi Thompson of the US, the youngest player to win an LPGA tournament, who was 16 years, seven months and eight days old when she clinched a five-stroke victory in the Navistar LPGA Classic.
The male nominees are: Usain Bolt of Jamaica, who ran the fastest 100m of the year at 9.76 seconds in the final Diamond League event, the Van Damme Memorial in Brussels; Novak Djokovic of Serbia, who beat Rafael Nadal for the sixth straight time this year to earn the first US Open championship of his career and third Grand Slam title of the year; Patrick Makau of Kenya, who broke Haile Gebrselassie’s three-year-old marathon record with a time of 2 hours, 3 minutes and 38 seconds in Berlin; US boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr, who knocked out defending WBC welterweight champion Victor Ortiz with one second left in the fourth round in Las Vegas; Cam Newton from Auburn University in the US, who had the best passing performance by a rookie in NFL history, passing for 422 yards and accounting for all three of the Panthers’ touchdowns in a 28-21 road loss to the Arizona Cardinals; and the New York Yankees’ Mariano Rivera of Panama, who broke the major league record for most career saves, recording save No. 602 by throwing a perfect ninth inning in a 6-4 win against the Minnesota Twins.
To vote for last month’s Athletes of the Month, go to http://ussa.edu/ballots/athlete-of-the-month.
Voting ends on Monday.
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