Prime Minister Awards 10 Top Athletes with 5 Million Dram Each

The winners of the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport's "Top 10 Athletes of the Year" competition will now be awarded 5 million drams each. Previously, there was no budgetary funding allocated for the awarding of Armenia’s top 10 athletes. However, this year, 50 million drams have been allocated from the state budget's reserve fund to the Ministry for this purpose.

Today, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan received the first awardees at the presidential residence—the winners of the 2019 "Top 10 Athletes of the Year" competition: Artur Aleksanyan (Greco-Roman wrestling), Ruben Aleksanyan (weightlifting), Artur Avetisyan (gymnastics), Hovhannes Bachkov (boxing), Slavik Galstyan (Greco-Roman wrestling), Tigran Kirakosyan (sambo), Arsen Harutyunyan (freestyle wrestling), Simon Martirosyan (weightlifting), Gor Minasyan (weightlifting), and Hakob Mkrtchyan (weightlifting).

The list of participants in the "Top 10 Athletes of the Year" competition (25 athletes) was compiled through the following procedure: the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport submitted a list of athletes who recorded high achievements in Olympic and non-Olympic sports, including judo, sambo, and chess, during the year 2019, according to the criteria established by the Minister's order. The federations proposed 1-3 candidates who had significant sports achievements over the past year, earned prize placements, recorded individual successes in team sports, and made Armenia and the Armenian people more recognizable through their performances.

The winners were determined based on a combination of votes from coaches of the national teams registered with the Ministry, representatives from sports federations, journalists, and SMS voting, with each component accounting for one-third of the overall results.