For the second time in a matter of months, a Mexican woman has climbed to the top of a global sporting podium, as flag football star Victoria Chávez has been voted the 2025 World Games Athlete of the Year.
Her emergence last month from a pool of 30 worldwide nominees came on the heels of soccer player Lizbeth Ovalle winning FIFA’s 2025 Marta Award for her amazing “scorpion kick” deemed the best women’s goal of the year.
(Conade)
Chávez, a wide receiver from the city of Chihuahua, captured 50,537 votes in an online fan poll.
She finished ahead of a two-person entry, competitive ballroom dance team Marius Andrei Balan and Khrystyna Moshenska of Germany, and a fellow Mexican, Laura Burgos of Monterrey, Nuevo León, who won gold in muay thai (kickboxing) at the 2025 World Games.
The Germans received 43,528 votes to rank as first runner-up, and Burgos 29,753 votes for second runner-up. All received a trophy and other prizes.
Mexican archer Maya Becerra of Zapopan, Jalisco, was also among the 30 nominees, giving Mexico three candidates for the first time.
The vote honored athletes who excel at the World Games, a quadrennial multi-sport event for mostly non-Olympic disciplines such as squash, tug-of-war and korfball (similar to basketball).
It is a single, gender-neutral award rather than separate men’s and women’s categories. The 2022 winner was Colombian flying disc player Valeria Cárdenas.
The latest World Games were held in August 2025 in Chengdu, China, where Mexico’s women’s flag football team defended its previous title by beating the United States 26-21 on a last-second touchdown catch by the 24-year-old Chávez — a gold-medal victory hailed a day later by President Claudia Sheinbaum.
Mexico also defeated the United States to win gold in 2022, when the COVID-delayed 2021 games were held in Birmingham, Alabama.
With flag football set to debut at the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, Mexico’s women — currently ranked No. 1 in the world ahead of the United States and Great Britain — are expected to contend for gold.
Chávez won the award after a comeback from a serious knee injury.
“It’s a dream come true for me,” she told Mexico’s National Commission for Physical Culture and Sport. “Experiencing all of this with my team surpasses any dream I could have imagined.”
The announcement of her award came just months after Ovalle was declared the winner of the Marta Award for the spectacular 2025 goal she scored while playing for the Monterrey-based Tigres UANL women’s pro soccer team.
The 26-year-old from Aguascalientes currently plays for the Orlando Pride in the U.S.-based National Women’s Soccer League. She joined the club in August on a transfer fee of about US $1.5 million, which set a record for women’s soccer at that time.
With reports from Conecta and IMER Noticias
