Bianca Andreescu, Simona Halep and Serena Williams were honoured for their talents ahead of the 2020 season.
Andreescu, the reigning US Open, won the Bobbie Rosenfeld Award as The Canadian Press ‘Female Athlete of the Year’. With the list of achievements the teenager racked up, it is no wonder that she won the award almost unanimously, with 66 votes out of 68.
The Canadian got the honour as the first tennis player to be named Canada’s athlete of the year in five years, with Eugenie Bouchard winning twice in 2013 and 2014.
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Ranked outside the top 150 at the beginning of the year, Andreescu stepped up to reach the finals at the ASB Classic at the first tournament of the year. Andreescu’s most significant moment of her career till then came when she won the Indian Wells Open defeating former world no.1 Angelique Kerber in a riveting three-set match.
Back home, Andreescu took home the Rogers Cup defeating the ‘Player of the Decade’, Serena Williams. She became the first Canadian to win the title in 50 years, an exceptional feat accomplished by the youngster. The victory in Toronto was followed with the mammoth feat of winning the US Open against six-time champion Williams.
Wimbledon champion and former world no.1, Simona Halep was named Player of the Year at the Romanian Tennis Awards.
The Romanian was ranked first in 2018, winning an impressive six WTA titles in the year. This year, while she slipped down a few ranks, she played consistently, ending the year inside the top 10 at no.5. Halep reached the finals at the Qatar Open early in the year and reached the semi-finals at the Miami Open.
She went on to reach the finals at the Madrid Open and the quarterfinals at the Roland Garros where she was the defending champion. Her biggest victory of the year was at Wimbledon where she defeated Serena Williams in straight sets to win her second Grand Slam title.
Serena Williams, who has 23 Grand Slam titles to her name, just one less than Margaret Court’s record, was selected by The Associated Press as the ‘Female Athlete of the Decade’.
If that wasn’t impressive enough, Williams equalled Steffi Graf’s record for the most number of weeks spent as world no.1 consecutively.
She is also the oldest woman to win a Grand Slam singles trophy and despite the complication during the birth of her daughter, defied the odds to come back on court stronger than ever.
Earning 12 Grand Slam titles in the past decade, while no one else has won more than three titles in the same span of time, Williams is in a league of her own.
The American is also the only other woman to have won every Grand Slam three times or more and has to her name one singles Olympics gold medals and three doubles gold medals. Next season is one for the record books with the possibility of Williams winning her 24th Grand Slam.
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