Yorkshire Sports Performer 2022: Matt Fitzpatrick or Tom Pidcock, Beth Mead or Hannah Cockroft - cast your vote and win tickets to see Yorkshire Vikings

Some of them, the very best, operate at the highest levels of their craft, and in 2022, accomplished feats that defined their career.

And that’s where we turn it over to you to decide Yorkshire’s Sports Performer of 2022.

Now into its second decade, the award has been won in the past by the likes of Jessica Ennis-Hill, Kevin Sinfield and Matt Fitzpatrick - one of whom makes our shortlist of 15 again this year.

All you need to do is email in your vote to us [email protected] by Friday December 30 and the sports star with the most votes will be our winner and will be revealed on Saturday December 31.

And you can win two, with four tickets to see a Yorkshire Vikings game of your choice, excluding versus Lancashire, next summer. Details of that are below.

So here are our 15 contenders. If we missed anyone, it’s because athletes from the county are just too damn good.

1 Harris Akbar – The Bradford boxer underlined his potential as a Yorkshire Olympian of the future when he won gold at the European Championships in Armenia this summer, enhancing his growing reputation among the GB Boxing squad based at the English Institute of Sport in Sheffield. He also reached the quarter-finals of the light middleweight division at the Commonwealth Games, losing to the man he had beaten in the continental final.

2 Zoe Aldcroft - Scarborough-born rugby union player who was named world player of the year last year and built on that in 2022 by helping England stretch that unbeaten run to 30 games. She would have swapped it all for one more win, but alas, New Zealand beat Aldcroft’s England in a thrilling World Cup final.

3 Jonny Bairstow - The Yorkshire cricketer epitomised the new Test cricket approach of Brendan McCullum and Ben Stokes with some buccaneering performances in the summer, as time and again he smashed England to Test match victories. He scored more than 1,000 runs and hit six centuries in nine matches.

4 Harry Brook - Staying with cricket, Bairstow’s Yorkshire team-mate burst onto the international cricket scene becoming only the third player in history to score two centuries in his first three Test matches in the recent series win over Pakistan.

5 Hannah Cockroft - Another year, another gold medal, this time a first ever Commonwealth Games gold medal in the T33/34 100m in Birmingham. Why was it Hurricane Hannah’s first gold medal? Because para-athletes had never previously been allowed to compete at a Commonwealth Games. It was typical of our Hannah that she would be among the first to win a historic gold.

6 Matt Fitzpatrick - There is a sense of deja vu about this one. In 2013, the Sheffield golfer was on the shortlist for winning the US Amateur at Brookline. He is back on the list this year for winning the US Open at Brookline, becoming only the fourth English golfer in half a century to win a men’s major. He won the YP’s sports performer of the year in 2013, will he win is again in 2022?

7 Mark Johnston - Group-1 winning Middleham-based Flat trainer who passed a record 5,000 winners during the season (4,874 on his own - the last few with son Charlie on the licence too). Johnston is Britain’s winning-most trainer - having sent out over 100 winners for 29 consecutive seasons.

8 Jack Laugher - Nine Commonwealth Games medals for this insatiable athlete, including three more in Birmingham this summer for the Harrogate diver. Also added two gold medals at the European Championships and three medals at the world championships in Budapest. One of Yorkshire’s finest on the international stage.

9 Beth Mead - The Whitby-born footballer has been established in the Lionesses team for half a decade but was the summer she, and they, broke the glass ceiling, winning the European Championships in uplifting style, with Mead scoring six goals and being name player of the tournament in the process. An emerging superstar.

10 Tom Pidcock - This man is no longer emerging, he’s already there. Off the back of an Olympic gold in mountain biking last summer, Pidcock added the world cyclo-cross title in Arkansas at the start of the year and then on his Tour de France debut, produced a stage win up Alpe d’Huez that had the rest of the peloton in awe at the speed in which he descended Pyreneen mountains.

11 Dalton Smith - The Sheffield super lightweight had a busy 2022 with four fights. He won two by knockout, one by a corner retirement and the final one via a unanimous decision. Became British champion in his home city in August and claimed the WBC international silver belt in Leeds in March. A world title shot will not be far away.

12 Bradly Sinden - Gold was starting to elude the taekwondo star from Doncaster who was a world champion in 2019, but disappointed to only take home silver from the Olympics in Tokyo last summer. He retook top spot on the podium at the European Championships in Manchester and then added another silver at the recent worlds.

13 James Willstrop - You would have been forgiven for thinking the former world No 1 had retired - but instead the 38-year-old from Pontefract emerged out of the Covid pandemic in a far happier place on a squash than he’d ever been and it showed, as he rolled back the years to win second Commonwealth Games gold medal in the men’s doubles.

14 Lauren-Winfield Hill - the third cricketer to make the list, Winfield-Hill was instrumental as Northern Diamonds finally got the monkey off their backs by winning a one-day tournament at Lord’s.

15 Dom Young - Emerged as a new talent in rugby league. Fresh from scoring 14 tries in 20 games for NRL club Newcastle Knights, the Wakefield-born 21-year-old crossed nine times in five outings on England’s run to the World Cup semi-finals.

Cast your vote and win tickets to see Yorkshire Vikings

The search for Yorkshire’s Sports Performer of 2022 is just a bit of fun from The Yorkshire Post...but also this year it comes with a prize.

Thanks to our good friends at Yorkshire County Cricket Club, we can offer four tickets to a T20 Blast game of your choice next summer, excluding the Vikings clash with Lancashire Lightning.

All you need to do is email in your vote to us [email protected] by Friday December 30 and the sports star with the most votes will be our winner and will be revealed in the newspaper and online on Saturday December 31.

Please put the title Sports Performer in the subject line.

Please include full contact details - and hurry, entries close at 12pm on December 30.

The first one correct entry chosen at random after the deadline will win the four tickets.

Winners will be notified in the New Year.

National World are the publishers of the Yorkshire Post.

Normal National World competition rules apply, for more information go to: https://www.nationalworldplc.com/competition-prize-draw-terms-and-conditions

The competition is open to residents of the UK, Channel Islands, Isle of Man and Republic of Ireland aged 16 years or over.

Submission of an entry will be taken to mean acceptance of these terms and conditions.

All entries must be received by the advertised closing time and date.

Late entries will not be accepted.

No responsibility can be accepted for lost entries and proof of transmission will not be accepted as proof of receipt.

Fixtures to choose from:

MAY

28 v Durham at Headingley

JUNE

4 v Derbyshire at Headingley

9 v Worcestershire at Headingley

16 v Leicestershire at Headingley

20 v Northamptonshire at Headingley

22 v Birmingham at Headingley

Good luck.