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2021 has been a glorious year for Indian sports and the annual Sportstar Aces Awards is back with its fourth edition to honour these heroes.
Indian athletes achieved tremendous feats at the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics, bringing home a record number of medals.
Neeraj Chopra won a historic first-ever track and field gold medal in Tokyo, while P. V. Sindhu added another Olympic medal to her trophy cabinet. The hockey teams, too, made us proud with scintillating runs to the medal rounds.
Our Paralympians – led by Avani Lekhara, Sumit Antil, Pramod Bhagat, and others – did even better, winning 19 medals.
Our men’s cricket team reached the final of the first-ever World Test Championship and secured memorable overseas victories in Australia and England. In football, India won the men’s SAFF Championship.
We have 25 categories of Awards this year – five Popular Choice and 20 Jury Awards. The 5 Popular Choice Awards are Sportsman of the Year, Sportswoman of the Year, National Team of the Year, Club Team of the Year, and Sporting Moment of the Year.
There will also be a separate Chairperson’s Award for Sports for Social Good, which will honour individuals or organisations that have used the power of sports to make our world a better place.
Sportstar has never been solely about the stars in sports. We wrote about a little-known Sachin Tendulkar when he was knocking big hundreds in the Mumbai Maidans, we highlighted the achievements of a young Leander Paes in the Bertram Tournament in Chennai. And The Hindu and Sportstar still continue to regularly cover and report on age-group tournaments. Extraordinary young talents, ready to shoulder the burden of India’s expectations, have regularly been featured in our Young Achievers category.
Relaunched in 2019, the third edition of the Aces awards in April 2021 celebrated the GoDs – Giants of the Decade (2011-2020) – of Indian sports.
Among the winners were P. V Sindhu, M. S. Dhoni, Mithali Raj, Manpreet Singh, Rani Rampal, and many more.
