Espy Awards

The ESPY Awards is an annual sports awards event created and broadcast by American cable television network ESPN. Begun in 1993, the event confers eponymous awards, fully styled as Excellence in Sports Performance Yearly Awards, for individual and team athletic achievement and other sports-related performance during the calendar year preceding a given ceremony. Given the fact that the ESPYs are promotions of the sports network ESPN, and were named such that the acronyms are so similar, the awards are generally regarded as a celebration of the power of ESPN. As the similarly-styled Grammy, Emmy, and Academy Awards, the ESPYs are hosted by a contemporary celebrity; the style, though, is more relaxed, light, and self-referential than that of many other awards shows, with comedic sketches usually included.