(Reuters) – Phoenix Mercury center Brittney Griner has received the season-long WNBA Cares Community Assist Award in part for her continued work in championing the safe return of wrongful detainees overseas, the league said on Friday.
Throughout the 2023 WNBA season, Griner, who was freed from a Russian penal colony in a high-profile prisoner exchange last year, worked with Bring Our Families Home, a campaign that helps spread awareness about wrongfully detained Americans.
“I know the opportunity, privilege and responsibility I have to make a difference in the lives of others, and I’ll always remain committed to that,” Griner said in a WNBA news release.
Bring Our Families Home launched in April with a 30-foot-wide mural at the Mercury’s arena that featured the face of Griner and more than a dozen detained individuals along with a QR code that directed fans to the campaign’s website.
During the season, Griner and the Mercury also hosted families and friends of wrongful detainees at their games.
Griner, 33, was also honored for the BG Heart & Sole Shoe Drive she founded in 2016 which, in partnership with the Phoenix Rescue Mission, distributed nearly 3,000 pairs of shoes this season to those in need in the Phoenix metro area.
Griner, a two-time Olympic gold medalist and nine-time Women’s National Basketball Association All-Star, was arrested in February 2022 at an airport outside Moscow for carrying vape cartridges containing hashish oil in her luggage.
She was subsequently convicted of drug smuggling and later transferred to one of Russia’s most notorious penal colonies, where former inmates have described torture, harsh beatings and slave labor conditions.
Griner was released last December in a prisoner swap with Russia in exchange for arms dealer Viktor Bout, a deal that was arranged after months of talks during a time of high tension between the two countries after Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine, which Moscow calls a ‘special military operation’.
(Reporting by Frank Pingue in Toronto; Editing by Ken Ferris)
