Sportspedia 100 – Year 2020

The Class of 2020 of the 100 best sportspeople in the world competed in 39 sports and hail from 34 countries, from every permanently inhabited continent.

Some sports and groups of sports were totally absent due to a total or partial shutdown during the pandemic, and some sportspeople did not compete at all due to travel limits.

Nevertheless, the Class of 2020 saw several historical milestones being achieved and extended. Feel free to click on each photo to know more about these individuals. You can also consult the full list with pictures here.

Revised Edition: On May 22, 2021 we discovered two numerical mistakes in our scoring that have now been corrected directly affecting the following the following results -and by consequence, some others:

1.-Several Bayern München players had not been accounted for some of the team’s records during the season. Some had. This has been corrected, only adjudicating them records in the tournaments where these players participated at least as part of the bench.

2.-There was a scoring mistake in one of Ørjan Larsen’s cells: he had correctly been scored the points for being the most successful Age of Empires Players of all time however this number had not been factored by the number of years the Age of Empires series has existed competitively. The score has now been corrected with a change of about 8 points.

Second revision: During the work for the 2021 list (in 2022) we discovered that the “Carry-ball football” sportspeople had not been correctly accounted. This means that we had left out players from Gaelic Football and Rugby League that are now listed, as well as changing the score for the lone American Football player on the list. This is because we had failed to properly compare the all-time best players within the full category and had only accounted those from gridiron football.The names have been added.

Another blindspot we had was with Ma Long’s score, which also affected other “ball-over-net-with-racquet” sports.

We apologize for these mistakes! This is the first edition. We prefer to correct the list retroactively and be accurate rather than hiding our blind spots!