A few days before the end of a year 2022 in which it has removed from its calendar almost all of the sporting events planned on its soil, with the exception of the Beijing Winter Games and the World Table Tennis Team Championships. , China is engaging in the ritual exercise of taking stock. It reveals quite surprising results. The official press agency Xinhua (New China) has published its ranking of the ten world athletes of the year 2022. It recognizes… a Chinese woman. Eileen Gu (photo above), 19, triple Olympic medalist at the Beijing Winter Games in freestyle skiing (gold in Big Air and halfpipe, silver in slopestyle), tops the rankings in Xinhua, ahead of Lionel Messi and another Winter Games heroine, Dutch speed skater Irene Schouten. The rest of the world's top 10 is made up of athletes Eliud Kipchoge and Armand "Mondo" Duplantis, tennis players Rafal Nadal and Iga Swiatek, Frenchman Karim Benzema, American swimmer Katie Ledecky and Dutch racing driver Max Verstappen.
