PHOENIX, Arizona, December 27. SPORTS Illustrated readers voted Michael Phelps' performance at the London Olympic Games as the best Sports Moment of the Year for 2012. Phelps topped the polls with 21 percent of the vote, just ahead of gymnast Gabby Douglas (19 percent), who was honored for winning Olympic gold in the individual all-around competition.<\/p>\n
This isn't the first time Phelps has been honored by the magazine. In 2008, he was named Sports Illustrated's<\/i> Male Sportsman of the Year after winning eight gold medals, the most won in a single Olympiad, at the Beijing 2008 Olympics. Phelps has appeared on the cover nearly a dozen times.<\/p>\n
At the London Olympics, Phelps won four gold and six total medals. This upped his career Olympic medal count to 22, making him the most decorated Olympic athlete of all time. The Games marked Phelps' last swimming competition before retiring from the sport. <\/p>\n
Other nominations in the category of Sports Moment of the Year include: track athlete Usain Bolt's performance at the London Olympics, the San Francisco Giants winning the World Series and quarterback Peyton Manning returning to the NFL.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
PHOENIX, Arizona, December 27. SPORTS Illustrated readers voted Michael Phelps' performance at the London Olympic Games as the best Sports Moment of the Year for 2012. Phelps topped the polls<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"dois","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,7,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured","category-usa","category-zzzzzzzzz"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\r\n