Manuel

Messi got an ovation from a packed theater in Spain on Friday, with the King and Queen in the room, and he gave it about 30 seconds with his eyes on the floor, fiddling with his jacket button. Then you see who else was on that stage. One of them was Christina Koch. She flew around the Moon back in April, the first woman ever to do it. Three more were the scientists who made reading DNA cheap. Two Cambridge chemists, David Klenerman and Shankar Balasubramanian, plus a French biophysicist named Pascal Mayer. Their work took the cost of reading one full human genome from over a billion dollars and about a decade down to roughly a thousand bucks and a single day. The company the two chemists started became Illumina, and most DNA sequencing on the planet still runs on their method. Studio Ghibli was up there too, the studio behind Spirited Away, along with Patti Smith and the novelist Julian Barnes. Messi was the most famous person in that building by a mile. Spanish reporters in the room said it looked like he didn't want to pull any of the spotlight off everyone else, so he let the applause go and got out of the way. The award is the Princess of Asturias, which people in Spain call the Spanish Nobel. The same foundation honored Nelson Mandela back in 1992. Football has had a weird history with this prize. Brazil's national team won it in 2002, Spain's won in 2010, and Casillas and Xavi shared it in 2012. In 2009 the jury had a Barcelona team that had just won the treble with a 22-year-old Messi, and they voted it out before the final round. A Russian pole vaulter ended up winning. Seventeen years later, he's the first footballer to ever win it by himself. Princess Leonor handed it to him and told the room she wasn't sure anything else on earth could make the whole world feel the same thing at the same moment. He didn't give a speech. A guy with eight Ballon d'Ors was standing next to the people who made the genome cheap to read and a woman who'd just been to the Moon, and he treated his own ovation like he was holding up the line.