Catalonia's sporting winners for 2014

When I started this col­umn in Jan­u­ary, the aim was to focus the spot­light on some of Cat­alo­nia's sport­ing tal­ent. This is a small coun­try blessed by a dis­pro­por­tion­ate num­ber of cham­pi­ons, but the he­roes of less pop­u­lar sports, as well as younger ath­letes tend to be over­looked. Thus, every month, I fea­tured a pro­file of a dif­fer­ent sports per­son, hop­ing to shine a light on the men and women who work so hard and sac­ri­fice so much for their cho­sen dis­ci­pline.

I am not the only one and a much more ef­fec­tive way of achiev­ing the same aim comes from the an­nual Festa de l'Es­port Català. This year is the 18th edi­tion of the awards and, on De­cem­ber 15, the cho­sen win­ners will re­ceive their prizes and some well-earned ac­claim. Or­gan­ised by the Unió de Fed­era­cions Es­portives de Catalunya and the daily sports paper, Sport, the awards recog­nise sports peo­ple in dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories, in­clud­ing male and fe­male, for es­tab­lished ath­letes and new­com­ers. What fol­lows is a sum­mary of the win­ners, some of which have al­ready ap­peared on these pages over the past 12 months.

On No­vem­ber 13, it was an­nounced that the jury had reached its de­ci­sion after an in­ter­net cam­paign in which sports fans voted for their favourite ath­letes. It is no sur­prise that the main cat­e­gories – best Cata­lan sports man and woman – were awarded to the mo­tor­cy­clists Marc Márquez and Laia Sanz. The first this year won his sec­ond con­sec­u­tive Mo­toGP world title and re­mains only one of four rid­ers to have won world cham­pi­onship ti­tles in three dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories. Sanz, mean­while, is the 13 times Women's Trial World Cham­pion and 10 times Women's Trial Eu­ro­pean Cham­pion in Out­door Mo­tor­cy­cle Tri­als. This year, Sanz re­ceived plau­dits for her per­for­mance in the gru­elling Dakar rally, com­ing first in the women's cat­e­gory and an im­pres­sive 16th over­all.

As for up-and-com­ing ath­letes, the jury recog­nised three young sports men and women who are mak­ing waves in Cata­lan sport: the sail­ing pair Jordi Xam­mar and Joan Herp and swim­mer África Zamorano. The for­mer be­came youth world cham­pi­ons in the 470 dinghy class and the lat­ter picked up a gold medal in the 200 metre freestyle dur­ing the 2014 Eu­ro­pean swim­ming cham­pi­onships.

The jury gave hon­orou­ble men­tions to the CN Atlètic Barceloneta men's wa­ter­polo team and the CPA Olot fe­male skat­ing team. Also recog­nised were a host of sports clubs in Cat­alo­nia for bring­ing through such a tal­ented group of in­di­vid­u­als.