An Aussie Tour de Force and a mastery of the greens have Ben O’Connor and Hannah Green firmly in contention for the SportWest WA Sports Star of the Year award.
They join Olympic champions Nina Kennedy and Matt Wearn along with swimmer Iona Anderson, cricketer Mitch Marsh, Australian water polo captain Zoe Arancini, surfer Jack Robinson, dual Brownlow Medallist Patrick Cripps, netballer Sophie Garbin, Diver Maddison Keeney and tennis star Matt Ebden on the shortlist for the prestigious award.
While Green couldn’t quite reach Olympic glory, narrowly missing out on a medal for the second games in a row, finishing one shot off the podium in Paris, she established herself among the golfing elite in 2024.
A previous Sport West WA Sport Star of the Year winner in 2019, Green laid down an early maker claiming a dramatic HSBC Women’s World Championship in Singapore to win her fourth LPGA Tour title in just her second start of the season.
Trailing by two strokes with three holes to play she reeled off three straight birdies including a monster 40-foot putt on the 18th to steal the title.
She then defended her JM Eagle LA Championship in April before completing a wire-to-wire win at the BMW Ladies Championship in South Korea.
In doing so she became just the third Australian after World Golf Hall of Famers Karrie Webb and Jan Stephenson to win three LGPA events in a single season reaching a career-high 5th in the world.
With six top 10 finished from her 20 starts Green was awarded a second Greg Norman Medal to cap off an outstanding season.
Ben O’Connor made the big call last year to sit out the Tour de France but it worked wonders for the 29-year-old who had struggled to replicate the heights of his fourth-place finish in 2021.
Without the pressure of the boiler room that is the Tour, O’Connor looked refreshed claiming stage six of the Vuelta a Espana giving him a stage win at all three grand tours.
It also put him in the red jersey as he came desperately close to becoming just the third Australian to win a Grand Tour before star Primoz Roglic wrested it back in a brutal stage 19 climb.
He held on for second becoming just the fifth Australian to finish on the general classification podium at a Grand Tour.
More second places followed at the UAE and Tour of the Alps before achieving his best-ever finish at the Giro d’Italia taking fourth missing the podium by less than two minutes.
His consistency lifted him to fourth in the 2024 UCI rider rankings with O’Connor saying ‘it was hard to beat’ this year in terms of results.
O’Connor has not given up on a crack at another Tour de France as he switches to Australian-based Team Jayco-AlUla for this year.
The winner of the Sports West WA Sport Star of the Year will be announced on February 6 in a presentation at Optus Stadium.
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