IT’S A BIG SHOCK FOR MIGHTY MO
He finally lifts trophy, but Joshua and Lewis don’t make top three
THE only person more surprised than Sir Mo Farah last night appeared to be his coach.
‘ That’s a **** ing joke,’ Gary Lough seemed to say to his wife, Paula Radcliffe, when the fourtime Olympic champion was voted the winner of BBC Sports Personality of the Year.
Perhaps, like the rest of us, he thought Liverpool had just become
La La Land with Kenny Dalglish cast in the role of Warren Beatty. Wrong film, wrong guy. Was it not supposed to be Anthony Joshua?
It turned out this was no Oscars cock-up, even if the BBC did then manage to lose their video link with Farah at the start of what was supposed to be his acceptance speech. Indeed, not until the live show had finished did the pictures of Farah return for a chat from London, first with the programme hosts and then with the media.
When the voting numbers landed, it was close. Farah had 83,524 — a third of what Andy Murray had last year — with Joshua fourth 10,000 votes behind. As much of a shock, it has to be said, was the fact that Jonathan Rea and Jonnie Peacock were crammed between them.
For Farah, however, this was a most unexpected victory, one he and his family did not anticipate given they chose this week for wife Tania to go back to Oregon to complete their move back to the UK while Mo looked after the kids. One the bookies didn’t see coming either. His odds were 50-1.
He was with his four children when the cameras went to him for his live interview earlier in the programme, his young son grabbing his microphone and rendering his father inaudible. ‘We can’t hear you but we adore you Mo,’ cried Gabby Logan. Perhaps that swung it.
But if truth be told SPOTY had become a source of frustration for Farah, because of what he regarded as a failure by the British public to fully recognise his achievements on the running track.
After winning that fourth Olympic gold in Rio last year he expressed his disappointment. ‘I’ve never been in the top three of Sports Personality,’ he complained, which is not true because he came third in 2011. ‘And I won’t be in the top three again. You have just got to accept what it is.’
The smart money was on Joshua, not least because he was here and because he was looking so sharp in his jacket and black turtle-neck jumper. He looked every inch a winner, every inch the man who conquered Wladimir Klitschko at Wembley last April in front of a crowd of 90,000. If all those people had voted, he would have taken the crown.
Those who witnessed the encounters between Ali and Frazier and Ali and Foreman ranked Joshua- Klitschko among the greatest heavyweight bouts in history. Even the lesser experts among us admired the manner in which the 28-year-old fought back from that sixth-round knockdown to stop the mighty Ukranian in the 11th to clinch the unified heavyweight world title.
Joshua, we assumed, was about to become the fifth boxer to win SPOTY in its 64-year history. Hell, Henry Cooper won it twice without being crowned world champion.
But this is a public vote and the public spoke, voting not for the fastest fists in the ring — perhaps because they cannot watch his fights on free-to-air television — but the fastest finisher to have contested a distance race.
Seemingly it did not matter that his now former coach is still the subject of a doping investigation in America. It was decided, albeit by less people than Joshua pulled into Wembley, that the time had arrived to recognise his dominance over 5,000m and 10,000m.
Joshua wore the smile of the defeated Oscar nominee while Farah admitted he ‘didn’t see that coming’.
He said: ‘ To be honest, I genuinely thought I wasn’t going to win. We’ve got amazing sports people in the UK. I thought I could make the top three but you don’t think you’re going to win it. It means the world to me.’
The interview was cut short by the ongoing chaos engulfing Farah. He explained that his kids were ill, that one of them had ‘thrown up everywhere’, and he said he had to go because he needed to put his youngest to bed. At least they had a replica trophy there.