The city is doing its part to ensure that Szczecin-based athletes Marek Kolbowicz, Konrad Wasielewski and Monika Pyrek earn places among the nation’s top performers in 2009.

Each is a nominee in the 75th annual competition run by the Sport Review newspaper to select the year’s top athletes, with readers voting on their favorites. Billboards around the city are aimed at getting out the vote and feature the trio.
Rowers Kolbowicz and Wasielewski, part of the country’s quadruple sculls team along with Adam Korol and Michal Jelinski, followed up their gold-medal performance at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing by winning the World Championship in Poznan earlier this year. Meanwhile, Pyrek, a pole-vaulter who is chasing a place in the Sport Review Top 10 for the fourth time, capture the silver medal at this year’s World Championships in Berlin.

The newspaper first selected its Athlete of the Year in 1926, when Waław Kuchar took the honour for his prowess in a range of sport, including athletics, football, figure skating and ice hockey, with votes by used to determining the year’s ten best. The competition was not held from 1939-1947 and in 1953. Stanisława Walasiewicz and Irena Szewińska-Kirszenstein share the record with four wins each in the overall competition.