Three of Mexico’s best young athletes collected major honors at the Panam Sports Junior Awards this week: 14-year-old diving twins Mía and Lía Cueva from the state of Jalisco and 21-year-old heptathlete Valeria Páez from Mexico City.
The awards recognize standout junior athletes from across the Americas — focusing on those who excelled among the 4,000 young competitors from 41 nations at the 2025 Junior Pan American Games (ASU2025) held in August in Asunción, Paraguay.
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Mía and Lía Cueva, who won the gold medal in 3-meter synchronized springboard diving at that competition, won the Sports Achievement Award over nine other nominees — both male and female, from various sports and countries.
The duo also won bronze in the same event at the 2025 World Aquatics Championships in Singapore in late July — an eye-popping accomplishment for divers who won’t turn 15 until next week.
In establishing themselves as contenders for the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles, they were competing against adults — often a decade older — in what is the highest level of the sport outside the Olympics.
The twins received 21.4% of the votes, outdistancing rower Nicole Martínez of Paraguay with 15.4%.
Overall, more than 45,000 votes were cast in online voting held Dec. 2-21. The categories are best athlete (male and female), sports achievement, best team (male and female), fair play and influencer. Typical nominees were in their teens to early 20s.
Valeria Páez won her category — the Influencer Award — with a 55.4% of the vote to easily beat out Argentinian female beach volleyball player Morena Abdala and Canadian male hockey player Morgan Garside.
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Páez, who has nearly 332,000 followers on TikTok and over 303,000 on Instagram, is heading into her senior season of track and field at the University of Nevada, Reno. She is a “multis” specialist who competes in events that make up heptathlons (outdoors) and pentathlons (indoors), such as hurdles, high jump, long jump, javelin and the 200 meters.
Páez was singled out for her online presence during ASU2025 in Paraguay, where she finished fifth in heptathlon but received hundreds of thousands of likes on some of her social media posts — on topics ranging from her training methods to Mexico’s uniforms.
Páez and the Cuevas were the only three Mexican nominees — and all three came away winners.
Their trophies will be presented at the Panam Sports General Assembly in 2026, though no site or date has been announced.
The Pan American Sports Organization is headquartered in Mexico City, with other main offices in Miami, Florida, and Santiago, Chile.
With reports from La Jornada and the Pan American Sports Organization
