World number one Justine Henin is the recipient of the 2007 United States Sports Academy Female Athlete of the Year award.
Henin was named Female Athlete of the Year after completing a year in which she lost only four of 67 singles matches.
She won 10 tournament titles in 2007 including two majors, making the 25-year-old Belgian the first player since Martina Hingis in 1997 to record double-digit victories in a season. Henin became the first woman to pass $5 million in season earnings.
Venus Williams took second in the women’s voting just ahead of American swimmer Natalie Coughlin who took third place.
The ballot was open to voting from 1-25 December. Overall, the ballot received hundreds of thousands of votes from sports fans around the globe. The Academy Athlete of the Year presented by USATODAY.com and MSNBC.com is the culmination of the Academy’s yearlong Athlete of the Month program, which recognizes the accomplishments of men and women in sports around the globe.
To view results from the Academy Athlete of the Year, please visit http://www.usatoday.com/sports/front.htm, http://athleteoftheyear.msnbc.com or http://www.ussa.edu/aoy/index.asp.
