 "Laureus World Sports Awards: Kimi Raikkonen making the day of crying six-year-old fan is August winner")
Kimi Raikkonen’s Spanish Grand Prix on 14 May ended in the first lap and moved Thomas Danel, a six-year-old fan of the Finnish driver from Amiens in France, to tears in the stands at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya. After Danel was pictured sobbing in the grandstand, Ferrari decided to cheer the youngster up by inviting him to their paddock to meet his idol. The heartwarming moment seems to have captured sports lovers’ imagination after it got a whopping 51.4 percent of the votes to become the first nominee for the Best Sporting Moment of the Year 2017 after winning August poll.
The video, which was among the six contenders for August, faced tough competition from Barcelona, who, on 8 March, overturned a seemingly impossible first-leg deficit of 0-4 to knock out Paris St-Germain and reach the quarter-final of the Champions League for the 10th successive season. Barcelona won 36.9 percent of the votes. Among other contenders for August were Francesco Totti bidding a tearful farewell to Italian club AS Roma after 28 years with the Serie A giants — which got 8.7 percent of the votes — and a heartwarming story about Sajjad Husaini and Ali Shah Farhang, two skiers from the war-torn country of Afghanistan competing in the World Championships for first time. A video on Kathrine Switzer, who became one of the most iconic leaders for women’s rights movement in 1967 after she officially completed the then all-male Boston Marathon despite an attempt to halt her mid-race, was also in the fray after she ran the Boston Marathon again in 2017, 50 years after that historic first run. Rounding up the nominees was the inspiring tale of Jamarion Styles, a basketball player who lost both his arms to a rare bacterial infection when he was just eight months old, who scored the buzzer-beating basket for his Eagles Landing Middle School in Boca Raton, Florida on 29 March. To view September’s emotional and engaging clips and vote for your favourite, visit myLaureus.com. Sports fans can also send videos that they have seen and enjoyed to myLaureus.com and they will be considered for the shortlist in future months.
