Defending Female Athlete of the Year Dafne Schippers is featured in the next part of our focus on the nominees for this year's men and women's award at the European Athletics Golden Tracks.
The Golden Tracks trophy will be presented to the leading European athletes and rising stars at a televised gala evening in Lausanne on Saturday 17 October and the voting will close on Monday 28 September.
Today we spotlight Schippers, Sifan Hassan, Sandra Perkovic, Pawel Fajdek and Piotr Malachowski.
You can vote through our Facebook and Twitter pages and click here to see the full list of nominees.
Female Athlete of the Year
When Dafne Schippers was named European Athletics Female Athlete of the Year 2014 at last October’s European awards ceremony in Baku, she spoke about her hopes of doubling up again in the sprints this summer.
Yet even with those hopes, the outcome could not have been predicted.
Schippers has had an extraordinary 2015, heading into her winter training as the European indoor 60m champion, the world 200m champion and the world 100m silver medallist.
On that impressive list can be added a series of national records, let alone being the third fastest woman of all-time over 200m.
Having decided to concentrate on sprinting rather the heptathlon last year, when she went on to win the 100m and 200m at the European Athletics Championships in Zurich, Schippers moved indoors to triumph in Prague (7.05) last March.
Then it was full steam ahead for the IAAF World Championships in Beijing, where she arrived having lowered the national 100m record to 10.94 in Hengelo in May and then 10.92 in London.
In Beijing, she ran 10.83 in the semis and 10.81 for silver in the final before her stirring performance in the 200m, as she won gold in 21.63 to smash the championship record, European record and move to third on the all-time world list.
Schippers is joined in the nominees by her Dutch teammate Sifan Hassan, who ran the fastest 1500m by a European runner for nine years.
That time came at the Diamond League in Monaco in July where Hassan, 22, broke the European under-23 record with her brilliant 3:56.05 as she finished second behind Ethiopian Genzebe Dibaba’s world record run of 3:56.05.
It was a Dutch national record and further confirmation of the status that Hassan, the European champion, now has on the world stage.
That was shown again a few weeks later at the world championships where she won bronze in 4:09.34.
Five months earlier, Hassan had run 0.30 quicker to take gold at the European Athletics Indoor Championships in Prague, another superlative performance in a year she will long remember.
Croatia’s Sandra Perkovic once more ended the summer as Europe’s leading discus thrower, but it was the winter season where she achieved her best throw of 70.08m in Split in March.
While she did not improve upon that throw, it still became another great year for the Olympic and triple European champion.
Perkovic won silver in Beijing (67.39m) and then won the Diamond Race for the fourth time in a row in overwhelming fashion.
She triumphed with 30 points – 23 ahead of Cuba’s Yaimi Perez in second – and celebrated with victory in the final in Brussels with 67.50m.
Male Athlete of the Year
Polish teammates Pawel Fajdek and Piotr Malachowski threw their way to gold at the world championships in Beijing in what was a spectacular summer for them both.
By the time of the championships, Fajdek was being talked about after his exploits earlier in August when, in Szczecin, he reached a distance of 83.93m.
It was some display on home soil at the 61st Janusz Kusocinski Memorial where he broke his national record twice.
He had held the mark of 83.48m before throwing 83.83m and then 83.93m at this European Athletics Classic Outdoor Meeting and not surprisingly he said: “It is a shock for me.'
It took him to Beijing in brilliant form and he defended his world title by winning by over two metres with a fourth round effort of 80.88m.
It had been five years since Malachowski had won a gold medal at a major event but that gap was bridged at the world championships when he took the title with 67.40m in the second round to beat Belgium’s Philip Milanov (66.90m) and fellow Pole Robert Urbanek (65.18m).
Malachowski, the 2010 European champion in Barcelona, can now add this world gold to his two silvers, from Berlin 2009 and Moscow 2013, having triumphed in the Bird’s Nest Stadium; he had taken second place at the Olympics in Beijing 2008.
It was a year of immense consistency from Malachowski, who finished with the world’s best throw of 68.29m from Cetniewo in August and then he completed his fine run by taking the Diamond Race crown for the third time, successfully defending the title he also won in the first year of the competition back in 2010.