This year, these 21 athletes made the leap from mere fame (or, in some cases, total anonymity) to iconhood. You'll like them — which is good, since we'll all be spending a lot more time with them going forward.
Robert Griffin III
Of the three major American sports, football seems to be the toughest in which to predict the arc of a career. Injuries are ubiquitous, and the game is highly complex; even the most important players are working with 10 teammates at once. A guy who comes out of the gate fast might get hurt and never play again, or he might just not turn out to be as good as we thought he was, his weaknesses having been hidden by teammates or the strategic moves of a coach.
That being said, if Robert Griffin III doesn't become a LeBron James-sized figure in American culture, I'll be surprised.
Merely on the field, RGIII has exploded as a rookie, almost from day one becoming one of the NFL's most thrilling and innovative players. Quarterbacks as smart as he is aren't supposed to move that way; quarterbacks who move that way aren't supposed to have that accuracy and power. Off the field, he has done the miraculous, turning one of the league's most reviled and pathetic franchises, a team constantly hamstrung by a petty and dickish owner, into a vehicle of fun, appealing football. Washington, D.C. adores him with the love that only comes out of a resurrection. And he's doing this as a black quarterback, one of the most racially and culturally under-the-microscope positions in sports.
Want a concrete measure of his icon status? Griffin's jersey sold more this year than any other player's jersey has ever sold in a single season. He's 22.
Image by Rick Osentoski / AP
Mike Trout
If Bryce Harper is baseball's messy evolutionary future, Mike Trout is its perfected past and present. Trout doesn't necessarily do anything differently than other baseball players; he just does it better. He does everything better. Trout might have had the most perfect season by a rookie in MLB history, coming in second in the MVP voting behind the first player to win a Triple Crown in 45 years, hitting .326/.399/.564, with 30 home runs and 49 stolen bases. He won the award given to baseball's best fielding center fielder. And he's on one of the best teams in the league. Mike Trout's going to be a very fundamental part of baseball, and American sports, for a very long time, so start paying attention now.
Image by Mel Evans / AP
Gabby Douglas
The others on this list are superstars, but not all of them are historically significant. Gabby Douglas is. In the 2012 Olympics, Douglas became the first woman of color of any nationality to win the individual gymnastics gold medal. As if that weren't enough, Douglas also became the first American gymnast to win gold in both the team and individual events, instantly becoming the latest in a long line of American women to create their own legends at the Olympic Games. Beyond all of that hagiography, Douglas was just awesome and fun as hell to watch and the reason that people spent a month of the summer complaining about spoilers. They wanted to see her win without knowing it would happen, because it was too worthy a spectacle to feel like you were just catching up on.
Source: s3-ec.buzzfed.com
Andy Murray
No sport has been so dominated by so few people for so long as tennis. Since February 2004, only three men — Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic — have held the #1 overall ranking. And for the last few years, a fourth, Andy Murray, has hung around the periphery, losing in Grand Slam finals and generally seeming undone by the forces of history, unlucky to be in the same game at the same time as those three guys. That all changed this year. First, after a heartbreaking loss to Federer at Wimbledon, Murray finally got over the hump; he made the best of his home-field advantage, taking the Olympics gold with a redemptive triumph over Federer. Then he beat Djokovic in a mindbending U.S. Open final, making him the first British man to win a major since 1936. Murray has finally established himself as a tennis player worthy of inclusion alongside Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic, and that means tennis could be the most exciting of any sport in 2013.
Image by Joe Scarnici / Getty Images