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December 5th, 2006
08:19 pm - Nearly 5,000 words on the BBC Sports Personality of the Year awards
I'm half-way through writing a longer blog post, but I've suddenly seen that the BBC have announced the contenders for the Sports Personality of the Year award. They have also announced the methodology for generating those contenders for the first time; this represents a remarked improvement in the transparency of the nomination process, for which the BBC is to be commended. Well done, the BBC!
The Sports Personality of the Year is an annual BBC tradition since 1954, with the same sort of anomalous but generally welcome place on the TV schedule and in British people's hearts as the Eurovision Song Contest, Children In Need, the Queen's Speech and some never-very-good firework-laden musical revelry at New Year. From time to time, people make calls for each of the above to be abolished as irrelevant, but it doesn't happen. Personally, I love them and cherish them as part of the calendar; I often don't watch the show, but it's definitely part of my Christmas season.
The broadcast takes place each year, normally early in December, for about two or three hours. (It usually overruns.) During the show, there are highlight reels showcasing the best of British sport for the year in each discipline, brief interviews with some of the stars and appropriate tributes to those who have left us this year. Some years there have been stunts as well; I happily remember the year that Nigel Mansell went and raced cars in the USA, only for the BBC to spring a Daytona USA arcade game challenge between him, Damon Hill (in the Formula One mantle abandoned by Mansell) and two other random sport stars in the audience. Mansell lost, but managed to work in a very neat brand-specific plug for his Nintendo game. Another memorable (but less fun) stunt was an attempt on the standing long jump world record by sundry leapers and other stray athletes. This year's show will be hosted by Sue Barker, Gary Lineker and Adrian Chiles; a good line-up, though one indicative of the de-emphasis on Grandstand these days. A putative hosting B-team of Steve Cram, John Inverdale and Clare Balding would look just as strong to me too.
However, the highlight of the show is the award ceremony. The senior award is the title of Sports Personality itself, with first runner-up and second runner-up also awarded. (I wish there was an authoritative list of second and third places, much like the authoritative lists of winners.) The "international sportsperson of the year" award and "team of the year" award also have forty-year histories, too; however, 1999 to 2003 saw the addiiton of five extra annual awards during the evening, for coach, young personality, lifetime achievement, the Helen Rollason award (conquering impairment or adversity) and Unsung Hero (administrator, trainer, organiser and the like). The rapid increase in the number of awards leaves less time for the fun stuff, but perhaps it has proved a popular shift in emphasis after all. Most awards ceremonies have far more than three gongs.
These days. the result of the main award is based upon a telephone vote over the course of the evening. In recent years, six contenders were announced; this year, ten have been identified, and the method by which those ten earned their nomination has also been revealed. The phone vote is a standard implementation of TV interactivity in this day and age, as well as a revenue stream. (There is a separate SMS txt vote ongoing, a week before the event, for Team of the Year.) Previously, there has been a write-in ballot printed in the Radiotimes listings magazine of legend - for a long time, Britain's most popular magazine, mag fans - though there have been long-standing allegations that not all votes were counted. A long-standing rumour was that the fishing lobby all voted for fisherman ("four-time coarse angling world champion") Bob Nudd every year, only for fishing to be disqualified as being insufficiently sporting. More of that later, though.
While the same allegations of impropriety could be made against the conduct of a phone vote as against the conduct of a written ballot, I tend to believe phone votes can be rather more strictly regulated if a company wants to continue using paid phone votes as a revenue stream. Certainly the main award and (these days) the team award are exceptional in having the public vote on them; most awards are decided by the choice of an unnamed panel. The awards may have originally all been given by panel; the selection of (now Sir) Christopher Chataway as winner of the first award in 1954 is surprising considering his best achievement that year was to act as pacemaker to Roger Bannister when he (Bannister) was running the world's first four-minute mile that year, as well as winning gold medals at the Commonwealth Games and the European Championships in the same year.
One of the large open questions about the event is what the title actually means, which has deliberately never precisely been defined. Certainly a part of it is "most accomplished" and a definite part of it is "most interesting". The tendency is for it to become "most famous" and the public ballot aspect of it tends to send it in the direction of "most popular", but I think the show does tend to frame itself in a way that encourages people to focus on the accomplishment rather than the, er, extent to which each candidate meets voters' tastes - placing a vote is a barrier to entry which discourages most except those self-identifying as sufficiently sportsfannish to be watching the show.
Now if the Sports Personality of the Year award were a simple poll of "Who's your favourite sports star?" then it probably would have tested fame above anything else - and David Beckham would likely have been winning for several years running on a rollover basis. That said, I do find it a worryingly conservative reflection on Americans' tastes that Michael Jordan won the "U.S.A.'s favourite sport star" poll every time it was held from 1993 to 2005. Now I know he's come out of retirement a couple of times, but surely continuing to place him at #2 still this year means that a lot of people, well, just aren't paying attention!
I also note that participants don't need to be British as such, they just need to be associated with Britain. For instance, past winner Barry McGuigan hails from the Republic of Ireland, which is close enough, and he was playing a relatively sympathetic role during that part of the Troubles). Jockey Lanfranco "Frankie" Dettori is Italian and yet still took third place one year, even though much of his riding was taking place outside the UK.
It's also traditional to note that some sports get a far higher share of winners than others. Being essentially an individual award (though ice-dancers Jane Torville and Christopher Dean are as atomic as Antan Dec and so won the main award jointly) participants in individual sports are far more frequently represented than members of teams, where it is often very difficult to single an individual out. It seems to work that domestic success in a team sport is insufficient, and you need to have represented your country with glory to earn favour, simply because "everybody" supports the national team whereas domestic competition loyalties are split far and wide.
Yet some sports still appear arguably over-represented to others, if you consider metrics of TV audience or attendance to accurately represent popularity. (There was a poll about "favourite sports" in the UK with relevance to Olympic funding not long ago, but I can't find it. Notably, swimming is an incredibly popular participation sport with very little spectator following, especially in contrast to track and field athletics.) There is probably an unintended bias toward sports that are otherwise heavily represented on the BBC, noting that the BBC tends to take a relatively broad sweep of sports under its purview as part of its public service commitment, particularly based around the Olympic games.
However, it's possible to determine some vague sort of "ranking list of sports" by virtue of their popularity across all sport, as measured by selection in this poll. I think it's also true that there is a roll-over "Buggins' turn" basis in part whereby there is an extent to which not just a single outstanding year but long-term dominance of a sport is rewarded by the public. After all, you can only beat the opposition put in front of you; it is understood that the multiple-champion system in boxing means that top contenders relatively rarely face each other, and success in sports where the player base is predominantly British (for instance, snooker) is lesser rewarded. (To reflect upon ranking lists of sports relative to other sports, see also the sports given individual attention on the BBC Sport web pages, and which ones even make it into "Other Sport..." - then compare those to their counterparts on, say, ESPN.)
A case in point is Phil "The Power" Taylor, who recently won his thirteenth (!) world championship, having been broadly dominant over the world of darts for the last fifteen or twenty years. It would seem to make sense for him to be nominated every year he remains dominant of a relatively minor sport from now on until he is eventually rewarded with a higher recognition than a nomination. It's also true that darts isn't that organised, high-profile and professional a sport, even though there are millions of amateur and tens or hundreds of thousands of low-level-competition players. Some would argue that the fact that darts is an activity that rewards accuracy rather than speed or strength counts against it, or the traditional (and increasingly inaccurate) view of the physique of a darts player.
It's also to be noted that there have been occasions when winners have had far from their best years in the years they have been awarded the title. It's a truism that "the British love a sporting loser"; it's also to be noted that Damon Hill and Nigel Mansell both won their first awards in years when they were denied the Formula One Drivers' Championship due to reasons outside their control in the final race, so perhaps the Sports Personality of the Year title is occasionally viewed as something of a consolation prize.
Nevertheless, it's notable that over the last twenty years, six awards have gone to participants in track and field athletics, four awards have gone to Formula One drivers (two drivers winning two awards each - and only three people have ever won two awards), three awards have gone to association (soccer) footballers and one award has gone to participants in each of golf, snooker, tennis, boxing, rowing, cricket and rugby union football. The rowing award was definitely for an accumulated performance over the years: Sir Steve Redgrave winning a fifth successive gold medal at a fifth consecutive Olympic Games.
It's interesting to note some of the major names who haven't won the award; Gary Lineker can reasonably feel a little unlucky not to have won the award in the year he won the Golden Boot for being top goalscorer at the World Cup, which is up there with World Player of the Year as individiual footballer accolades go, except a lot more objective, and Tim Henman and Frank Bruno long had successful careers, way ahead of their British competitors, in prominent individual sports. I have a suspicion that Henman and Bruno have each attracted at least two or three top-three places over the years; a chart of who had finished second and third each year would be extremely interesting to measure sustained superachievement.
With that in mind, even coming second or third in the annual poll is a remarkable achievement, and being nominated is still a major feather in the cap. The fact that ten people are being nominated for voting on the night as opposed to a previous six doesn't really diminish the credibility of a nomination. With this in mind, it is strongly to be welcomed that the BBC have published their nomination methodology this year; should people complain about certain sportsmen being denied even a nomination, it is clear how the nominees were selected in a way that it has not been clear in the past. A near-miss nominee can also recognise when they came 11th or 12th in the selection for nominations, which is still a pretty mighty achievement across all British sport.
The nominations came from a variety of sources: national daily newspapers, national Sunday newspapers, Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish newspapers, a rather motley selection of local newspapers, downmarket ladmags Zoo and Nuts, online votes from the public, written votes from the public and the nominations of the BBC Sport panel. The last one consists of BBC Sport TV presenters, approximately two-thirds of whom have been there and done that in a veritable sporting House of Lords and one-third of whom are Johnnies and Janies Come-Lately with no such sporting achievement to call their own.
The inclusion of separate online and written polls, but their de-emphasis as just source of votes among many is a wise move; the online poll had many votes for Mick Gault, presumably after a concerted effort by the sport shooting lobby, though he's not even famous enough to get his own Wikipedia page, and Steve Peat, a downhill mountain bicyclist, presumably also with a lobby behind him. These lobbies do deserve some credit for their success; one nomination each among 354 and a subsequent increase in profile sounds about right, one nomination each among 10 would be too much. (It's also to be noted that in the first year of Internet involvement in the award - '97 or so? - there was a voting campaign in favour of Justin Fashanu, rather mean-spiritedly selected because Fashanu was black, openly gay and playing at a very low level. That said, I still sent in an e-mail voting for him.) The written poll also generated a nomination for "Darren Kenny", of whom I know nothing.
Assuming all the sources' nominations count equally, which is a bit Borda-ish, I get that there were 354 nominations in total from 37 sources, and the total number of nominations per nominee as follows:
Monty Panesar: 33 - England spin bowler who took scads of wickets against India and Pakistan. Notable for being the first Sikh in the England team, plus also for having a disastrous start with his batting and fielding, making him a figure of fun, yet improving rapidly over the year. On the downside, he hasn't actually made the England team to play against Australia, but look how they're doing without him...
Darren Clarke: 32 - went 3/3 in the Ryder Cup as Europe beat the United States, just weeks after the death of his wife Heather. Is apparently reluctant to win the SPotY award on a sympathy vote for that fact.
Joe Calzaghe: 31 - super-middleweight champion of the world, has defended his title 18 (?) times, convincingly beat rival champion Jeff Lacy, arguably the world's longest-reigning champion boxer. Has been disparaging of the award and its past recipients; see the "the British love a sporting loser" argument above.
Andy Murray: 29 - 19-year-old tennis player who improved from 64th to 17th in the world, being only one of two players to beat world number one Roger Federer this season. Proudly Scottish and rather cheeky. Will eventually win the award once he wins a Grand Slam event.
Zara Phillips: 27 - claimed individual gold in the three-day eventing (dressage, cross-country riding and show-jumping) championship at the World Equestrian Games, also helping GB win team silver. Only the third rider to hold both European and World titles at the same time. The really cute thing is that her mother, the Princess Royal, was BBC Sports Personality of the Year in 1971, also for three-day eventing success. It is also to be noted that the BBC and the public were rather more deferential to royalty in 1971 than is the case today.
Beth Tweddle: 25 - first British gymnast to ever win a world championship, winning gold on the asymmetric uneven bars at both the European and World Championships this year.
Nicole Cooke: 20 - won the women's Tour de France, topped the women's world road race cycling rankings, won the major women's cycling time trial events.
Jenson Button: 10 - Formula One driver who won finally his first Grand Prix at his 113th or so attempt. Is young, handsome and cheeky. For my money, the weakest nomination in the ten as he's not necessarily even Britain's best driver this year; see Lewis Hamilton (GP2 champion), Andy Priaulx (won the World Touring Car Championship for a second straight year) or maybe even Dan Wheldon (second place in the Indy Racing League in the US).
Phil Taylor: 10 - at age 47, won the World Darts Championship (or, at least, the better-regarded half of it) for the thirteenth time. Won lots of other darts competitions as well, though apparently he lost four this year.
Ricky Hatton: 10 - honest and salt-of-the-earth world champion boxer, but had a quiet year. Relinquished his light-welterweight titles to fight for (and win) a welterweight title, but relinquished that to fight for the light-welterweight title again next year. Quite possibly Britain's best boxer pound for pound, but "played one, won one" this year shouldn't be enough to cut the mustard, no matter who the one is.
Ian Woosnam: 10 - can consider himself to have finished in 11th place by virtue of having as many votes as eighth, ninth and tenth place but not quite making the top ten. Captain of the European Ryder Cup golf team who hammered the USA team. Hasn't done much else for years.
Paul Casey: 8 - golfer who won the HSBC World Match Play Championship and scored a hole-in-one in the Ryder Cup to win a match. Poor Luke Donald, the UK's highest-in-the-world-rankings golfer, who also went 3/3 at the Ryder Cup, didn't get a single nomination. To win in Europe is evidently more highly prized than to nearly-win in the USA, though the latter is much better rewarded.
Tony McCoy: 8 - British champion jockey for the eleventh consecutive year and pretty inarguably the leading steeplechase rider of all time. Very large for a jockey. There is something of the Taylor factor here, but an aspect of his success is the quality of his mounts.
Colin Montgomerie: 7 - Scottish golfer. Came (tied) second in a Grand Slam event, a-gain. Cheered up noticeably this year compared to previous years after settling for £15,000,000 flat in his divorce. 8/8 in singles matches at the Ryder Cup over the years.
Shelley Rudman: 7 - won Great Britain's only medal at the Winter Olympics, a silver in the skeleton (luge) event. I have to confess that I had forgotten who she was.
John Terry: 6 - current captain of the England football team, only member of the England squad to make the all-star squad at this year's World Cup. Rugged defender, tough but keeps his nose clean.
Owen Hargreaves: 6 - midfielder in the above. He is particularly interesting this year because he kept getting selected for the England team and being unimpressive, up until the World Cup where he consistently played out of his skin despite the amassed public opprobrium.
Amir Khan: 5 - up-and-coming boxer. A real prospect for the future, and has done a lot of good work in Muslim community relations, but not Sports Personality of the Year yet, you fools.
Andrew Flintoff: 4 - England cricketer. Excellent bowler, but won the award last year. Likes drinking and smoking.
Peter Crouch: 4 - gangling goal-tapping England footballer. Teased for a long time by virtue of having lots of height and relatively little skill, but interesting because he overcame ridicule (c.f. Owen Hargreaves, q.v.) above had a real purple patch of form where he was banging in goals for fun.
Gail Emms: 3 - female half of the badminton mixed doubles world champions. The British male half of the team only got one nomination. I admit it, I'm not up on my badminton stars.
Ian Bell: 3 - computer programmer and co-author of Elite. Hang on, up-and-coming England batsman, scored centuries in three consecutive test matches against Pakistan. What of Paul Collingwood, who has been Britain's only very good batsman against Australia so far? Nul points. Incidentally, I think Collingwood was born at the same hospital as me, only seven months and three days later.
Mark Ramprakash: 3 - batsman at cricket. Hasn't batted for England since 2002, but had an outstanding domestic season as leading run-scorer, breaking a few other records along the way.
Steven Gerrard: 3 - footballer, who had either a brilliant or an awful season depending on who you ask.
Caitlin McClatchey: 2 - swimmer, won two gold medals for Scotland in the Commonwealth games. The Scottish block vote there, marvellous. (I'm not complaining about this; it's up to the non-national newspapers to promote their local interests effectively. I also think that one of her two nominations came from a Welsh paper in Celtic sympathy.)
Chris Hoy: 2 - cyclist, won the gold medal in the one kilometre time trial at the World Championships this year.
David Walliams: 2 - mmmmmmmmmmmmm. One of the prominent comedians of the day, but he swam the English Channel for charity and raised over a million pounds. Completed it in 10½ hours, which was one of the fifty best times ever. He was briefly considered favourite for this title at the time when (a) there wasn't much competition and (b) people weren't paying much attention.
Dean Macey: 2 - decathlete. Won the gold medal at the Commonwealth games, but that might well have been only the third decathlon that he has actually completed since, well, 9/11. Recently qualified as an angling coach, apparently. I am naturally biased in favour of decathletes, but if someone can compete only three times in five years, one of which was at a local qualifying event, then perhaps their highly fragile body sadly isn't the best use of Lottery funding after all.
Graham Poll: 2 - hee hee! Controversial football referee. Well done to the Evening Standard and the Sunday Times for picking him and no male football players in their nominations in an attempt to highlight the increasing role of referees in football. I think they're making a point, possibly one about how bad our players were this year.
Padraig Harrington: 2 - golfer who won more money than anyone else on the European tour this year.
Sir Alex Ferguson: 2 - gasp. Manager of Manchester United football club. Very successful, but iconic through his whingeing style.
Aaron Lennon, Andrew Strauss, Brian Noble, Craig Fallon, Darren Kenny, David Healy, David Murdoch, David Weir, Dee Caffari, Gary Neville, Graeme Dott, Gregor Tait, Harry Aikines-Aryeetey, Hope Powell, Jane Tomlinson, Jessica Kuerten, Joe Cole, Kevin Pietersen, Marc Warren, Matt Hampson, Matt Neal, Mick Gault, Nathan Robertson, Paul Hunter, Paul Scholes, Rebecca Lyne, Ross Brawn, Rowan Alexander, Ryan Giggs, Sean Long, Steve Peat, Steve Williams, Sven-Goran Eriksson, Tim Don, Walter Smith, Wayne Rooney: one vote each.
Some of these single-nomination votes have been placed for people who are very promising but haven't yet achieved anything. I like the vote for Paul Hunter, a much-missed recently departed snooker player and former world champion probably most famous for using a scheduled recovery break in a match to make love to his girlfriend, but I think it's a vote for using a vote to make a point rather than anything else. Hat tips for other votes for successful managers, and much more favourably viewed ones than Ferguson, S. A. above: Hope Powell (England women's football team) and Ross Brawn (Ferrari Formula One).
The question that obviously follows is who should be given a vote for nominations next year; after all, every set of votes cast is a reflection upon the organisation who cast them. Personally, I think Zoo and Nuts need to retain extremely high circulations to justify a continuation of their vote representing the, frankly, chav constituency. (They both voted for ten men, mostly of the laddish types. Not paying attention.) Keep the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish votes in, but I'm not sure why Birmingham and Coventry local papers deserve their own votes. I'd like to see more votes for the specialist sporting press; it might be interesting to give a vote to a football magazine on the condition that they can only nominate one footballer, and so on.
It's also interesting to note that the constituency of possible contenders is not precisely defined and, again, I think that is part of the award's appeal. It's fun that David Walliams can be considered against the rest, though he has a genuinely respectable sporting achievement. Remember, Dame Ellen MacArthur won a runner-up trophy in previous years; her mastery of the oceans is definitely on the adventurous side of sporting, even if not a mainstream sporting achievement. Likewise, Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson has won one of the mainstream awards, for being a champion wheelchair racer at every distance from the 100m to the marathon. Accusations of tokenism are always possible, but not well-founded in my view. And when the chairman of the British Paralympic Assocation complains at the absence of any disability sport athletes in the list, he can know who the voters were to complain to - in this case, all of them except the Mail on Sunday.
It's interesting to wonder whether any other para-sporting achievements, if that's a distinction that can be drawn without diminishing the magnitude of the achievements, ever deserve recognition. For instance, given the highly intense nature of DanceSport - a grasping-at-straws name if ever there were one - if the World Ballroom Dancing Champion(s) were to be British, might they deserve recognition? Certainly there's an argument that they deserve as much recognition as Torville and Dean and that it's just a historical accident that ice dancing happens to be in the (winter) Olympic Games yet ballroom dancing does not, but there's also the argument that every subjectively judged event does not have the same sporting purity as one where performances are objectively measured. I take an unashamedly liberal view on this one that all sport is to be celebrated. Really it would have to be a World Ballroom Dancing Championship - European Ballroom Dancing Championship - Strictly Come Dancing triple, I fear, to catch people's attention. Returning to the Bob Nudd example, I would tend to rate extended dominance of fishing on a par with extended dominance of darts, bearing in mind the comparability of fishing achievements.
Stretching this further, could a mind sport achievement ever make the list? Again, I take the liberal "why not?" view on this one. If Nigel Short had beaten Garry Kasparov over two months in 1993, I think he would have had a legitimate claim for recognition. If a Briton ever beats ten thousand other poker players in a hundred hours over ten days, even noting how much luck there is in a long poker championship, I think that deserves mainstream sporting recognition for stamina and judgment, as well as "$15,000,000 richer" recognition. Backing a WSoP win up with other tournaments would certainly help.
It starts to get more marginal in other mind sports; a British champion at backgammon or Scrabble has a claim, but a tenuous one, and although my old mate Ben Pridmore won a rigorous, pure and difficult competition in becoming World Memory Champion, I think I'd like there to be 104s or 105s, not 102s or possibly 103s, of sporting memorists worldwide before a world memory championship becomes more of an achievement than, say, a first badminton mixed doubles world championship. (Which is - nevertheless - a damn big, probably MBE-worthy, achievement.) As much as I'd like to see a British winner of the World Puzzle Championship or the World Sudoku Championship get wider acclaim - compare the number of sudoku solvers with the number of rowers, for instance! - I think it would take e.g. ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) oinomel71 or dumbgenius to win both halves of a World Puzzle Championship - World Sudoku Championship double (not impossible; onigame took a second-place double) before I'd start lobbying the voters to include him in their ballots.
The last - and biggest - questions are, of course, "Who should win this year?" and "Who will win this year?". Well, in each case, it's pretty clearly down to seven... I think Nicole Cooke and Zara Phillips have probably done best by the "Did they win everything they could this year?" metric, and there's probably less contribution due to outside forces in Cooke being aided by her bike than in Phillips being aided by her horse, so I think I'll probably be voting for Cooke. The markets reckon that the top three will be Clarke-Phillips-Calzaghe, though, which seems both plausible and worryingly unimaginitive. We shall see! Except, of course, that I won't, because it's only really worth watching live and I'll be working the night shift when the show is broadcast on Sunday night. :-\
Lastly, for those who prefer their sports American to British; with respect to all the Big Ten fans out there, especially angiej and irinaauthor, I reckon that the BCS have made their national championship selections correctly this year - or, at least, as correctly as it is possible to be within their current framework. Saying that "the best two teams in the country happen to be in the same conference" is an assertion that I think it would take more than polls and surveys to back up; if it's true then it's rather an indictment of how ill-suited favouring tradition through the conference system really is.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/neko/kaokitty/loved.gif) loved
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Comments:
My boyfriend's step-dad's argument for why Florida should be in and Michigan should be out was/is that, "I don't see how you can be the National Champion if you're not even your the champion of your conference." Which, you know, is a logical point.
I think we're all in agreement on this one. However, some commentators argue that not only is this not part of the rules, it shouldn't be - whereas I argue that it should with this as a case in point. In general I tend to prefer play-off-based solutions in addition to the traditional (but highly outdated!) bowls, but that's an entirely different argument.
I was also pleased and amazed to see this all laid out -- go BBC!
And I agree with you that Cooke is the most deserving recipient, although Calzaghe fans may feel he's earned one despite his disapproval thereof.
Cooke is bright and articulate and I'm sure would put in a good turn on the night.
But Britain being the soppy place it is, I guess the bookies are right to make Clarke a shoo-in.
+5 +10 for use of the phrase "shoo-in", which I always like because it is correct despite an incorrect alternative spelling looking equally plausible and equally sporting. The question regarding Joe Calzaghe is: "if not now, then when?" I think I would like to see him defeat two world-class boxers in a year rather than just one, noting how fragile his hands are causing fights to fall through for reasons outside his control, though a Bernard Hopkins, a Jermain Taylor or another super-middleweight title unification and A. N. Other good fight really ought to be good enough. It's remarkable that only one of his fights has ever gone to a split decision, with all the other decisions being unanimous and very clear. (I was at that fight which went to a split decision. Personally, I had it as a draw, or at least no more than a round in it.)
A saucy source off-LJ has pointed me to this BBC Press Release from 2003 with the details of the runners-up, as well as the winners, for almost all of the first 49 Sports Personality of the Year awards. Far less Frank Bruno and Tim Henman than I remembered, but far more Sally Gunnell and Steve Davis, back in the day when snooker was at its peak. Thanks, source. Thource. For completeness: 2003 - Year 50 3rd - Paula Radcliffe (athletics) 2nd - Martin Johnson (rugby union) 1st - Jonny Wilkinson (rugby union) 2004 - Year 51 3rd - Andrew Flintoff (cricket) 2nd - Matthew Pinsent (rowing) 1st - Kelly Holmes (athletics) 2005 - Year 52 3rd - Steven Gerrard (football) 2nd - Ellen MacArthur (sailing) 1st - Andrew Flintoff (cricket) ...and while there have been years with two of the three places going to ladies, they were 1962 and 1964. 13 of the past 20 years have had one place going to a lady.
Good heavens, all three were women in 1962. Certainly can't see that happening these days.
This might have brought out a hidden, yet important, element in the prize-giving - you need to be taking part in a highly televised sport.
It's no coincidence that there were so many snookerists well up in the poll in the 1980s. Barry Briggs' achievements in winning several World Speedway Championships (yeah, I googled it...) were obviously impressive - but is it remotely conceivable that a speedwayist could ever beat a World Cup final hat-trick these days? Can we even name a present-day speedway rider?
Button? Feh! Where's Lewis Hamilton, eh? Or Andy Priaulx? Or Justin Wilson, come to that.
I quite agree, as discussed.
If the age limit for the Young Personality award were 21 rather than 17 (and I must admit that I was surprised to learn it was as low as 17) then Lewis would have been a lock for it. With the barrier being 17 I find it rather hard to see past Theo Walcott, but I haven't been watching Newsround to find out about the others.
Forgive me for not reading your whole novel before posting!
Wheldon, yes, also a strong contender for top Brit motorsportist. Mysteriously gets little coverage in Autosport, compared to some. I think perhaps they turn their nose up slightly at IRL.
| From: | (Anonymous) |
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| Date: | December 7th, 2006 12:54 am (UTC) |
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| | sudoku???? | (Link) |
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