The Best Female Action Sports Athlete ESPY Award is an annual award honoring the achievements of a female athlete from the world of
action sports
Action sports, adventure sports or extreme sports are activities perceived as involving a high degree of risk. These activities often involve speed, height, a high level of physical exertion and highly specialized gear. Extreme tourism overl ...
. It was first awarded as part of the
ESPY Award
An ESPY Award (short for Excellence in Sports Performance Yearly Award) is an accolade currently presented by the American broadcast television network ABC, and previously ESPN (as of the 2017 ESPY Awards the latter still airs them in the for ...
s in 2004 after the non-gender-specific
Best Action Sports Athlete ESPY Award was presented the previous two years (with the American snowboarder
Kelly Clark
Kelly Clark (born July 26, 1983) is an American snowboarder who won halfpipe gold at the 2002 Winter Olympics. Clark was born in Newport, Rhode Island. She started snowboarding when she was 7 years old, began competing in 1999, and became a me ...
receiving the 2002 award). It is given to the female, irrespective of nationality or sport contested, adjudged to be the best action sports athlete in a given
calendar year.
Balloting for the award is undertaken by fans over the Internet from between three and five choices selected by the ESPN Select Nominating Committee, which is composed of a panel of experts. It is conferred in July to reflect performance and achievement over the preceding twelve months.
The inaugural winner of the award was the American
wakeboarder
Wakeboarding is a water sport in which the rider, standing on a wakeboard (a board with foot bindings), is towed behind a motorboat across its wake and especially up off the crest in order to perform aerial maneuvers. A hallmark of wakeboardin ...
Dallas Friday.
During 2003 and 2004, Friday won 12 of the available 14 professional women's titles, including national and world championships. She became the first wakeboarder to be nominated for, and hence to win, an ESPY Award. Athletes from the United States have won more times than any other nationality with ten (three times to snowboarders
Jamie Anderson and
Chloe Kim), followed by Australians with three, two of which went to the surfer
Stephanie Gilmore. Snowboarders are most successful sportspeople, with eleven awards, followed by surfers with four. It was not awarded in
2020
2020 was heavily defined by the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to global social and economic disruption, mass cancellations and postponements of events, worldwide lockdowns and the largest economic recession since the Great Depression in t ...
due to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, COVID-19 pandemic.
The most recent winner of the award was Chinese freestyle skier Eileen Gu in 2022 ESPY Awards, 2022.
Winners
Surfing
,
, -
,
2020
2020 was heavily defined by the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to global social and economic disruption, mass cancellations and postponements of events, worldwide lockdowns and the largest economic recession since the Great Depression in t ...
, colspan=5 align=center, ''Not awarded due to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, COVID-19 pandemic''
,
[
, -
, 2021 ESPY Awards, 2021
,
! scope=row ,
,
, Snowboarding (slopestyle)
, align=left , Eileen Gu () – Skiing ]
Carissa Moore () – Surfing
Zoi Sadowski-Synnott () – Snowboarding
,
Rayssa Leal () – Skateboarding
Zoi Sadowski-Synnott ( – Snowboarding
,
See also
* List of sports awards honoring women
* Best Male Action Sports Athlete ESPY Award
* Laureus World Sports Award for Action Sportsperson of the Year
References
External links
*
{{featured list
ESPY Awards
Awards established in 2004
Sports awards honoring women
Women's sports in the United States