Olympic bobsled champion Kaillie Humphries won the Lou Marsh Trophy, awarded to Canada’s Athlete of the Year.
The award, named after the former Toronto Star sports editor and columnist, was voted on by Canadian sports journalists on Wednesday.
The other finalists were tennis players Eugenie Bouchard and Milos Ranoic, hockey player Drew Doughty and lacrosse player Johnny Powless, according to the Canadian reports.
In Sochi, the tattooed Humphries became the first woman to repeat as an Olympic bobsled gold medalist. Women’s bobsled has been on the Olympic program since 2002.
Humphries is expected to make her four-man bobsled World Cup driving debut on Dec. 20 in Calgary. Four-man bobsled was made gender neutral by the international bobsled federation starting this season.
She’s the first bobsledder to win the award.
Other top Canadian athletes this year were Olympic champions Alex Bilodeau and Justine Dufour-Lapointe (moguls), Marielle Thompson (ski cross) and Marie Philip-Poulin (hockey).
Bouchard won 48 percent of votes in the first 2,500 votes of a Toronto Star public poll that did not officially factor into the selection. Humphries was second in that poll of 14 athletes with 17 percent. Sidney Crosby had less than 1 percent.
Canadian Football League running back Jon Cornish won the award last year.
Hockey is Canada’s sport, but Crosby is the only hockey player to win the Lou Marsh Trophy since Mario Lemieux in 1993. Crosby won in 2007 and 2009 (but baseball player Joey Votto won in 2010, the year Crosby scored Canada’s golden goal to win the Vancouver Olympics).
From 1984 through 2008, every Lou Marsh winner in an Olympic year was an Olympic or Paralympic champion.