The great SPOTY debate . . . what planet were they all on?
Viewing figures held up fairly well at 9.4million and the voting numbers were only slightly below par at 540,000.
Yet, as Sir Mo Farah vanished into the ether, his acceptance speech terminated by a cut in the video feed, it was hard to avoid the notion that the BBC’s Sports
Personality of the Year had been beamed in from another planet on Sunday night. it really was the most inaccurate representation imaginable of our sporting year.
not since double gold medalwinning Olympian Rebecca Adlington was overlooked in 2008 has the betting industry seen its calculations on the event go up in smoke so spectacularly.
neither world heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua — who was 1-12 at one stage — nor four-times Formula One world champion Lewis Hamilton made the top three.
Those heights were instead reached by an athlete who had dipped below his usual standards, a motorcyclist unrecognisable to most outside his sport and a para-athlete who finished eighth on Strictly Come Dancing.
The questions ‘ How?’ and ‘why?’ sprang to mind.
where winner Farah is concerned, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that the BBC had done him a monumental favour, in the year we saw him win one gold rather than his customary two and discovered his coach Alberto Salazar is the subject of a doping investigation.
The BBC’s interview with him, featuring his son removing a microphone and his daughter deftly rescuing the situation, reached parts that the show’s other interviews failed to reach.
A little domestic difficulty works wonders when the vote is cast in a 25-minute spell after all the candidates have been featured. A monotone Harry Kane speaking on stage just isn’t the same.
The Tottenham striker — who registered a miserly 18,759 votes — could be forgiven for having some sympathy with golfer Luke Donald, who reflected yesterday on how the BBC had marked his 2011 shortlisting by showing a ‘montage of me making a bunch of putts using a lightsaber’.
But motorcyclist Jonathan Rea’s extraordinary appearance in second place — just 3,000 votes behind Farah — also surely underlined the value of a lower-profile sport ‘getting the vote out’ on an occasion like this. Motorcycle
News was reminding its readers last week how to vote for Rea in a way that football did not.
A push for Kane from the FA might have bolstered support from those not of a Tottenham persuasion, but neither country nor club (with 40,000 seasonticket holders and 2.85m Twitter followers) seemed bothered. And a push for one of the women who took up the last four places might also have altered the men’s domination.
while Joshua’s failure to materialise in the top three reflects the way his sport has vanished behind a paywall, Jonnie Peacock’s appearance is the latest evidence of how the power of terrestrial TV has elevated the profile of para-athletes. Before London 2012, less than one per cent of the British population could name a Paralympian. On Sunday, Peacock claimed 73,429 votes.
Look back, though, and you see that the event has never been a vote for the best sporting achievement, but rather a reflection of big sporting events. You have to go back to 1996 to find a non- Olympian winner in an Olympic year. And of the mere five footballers to have won, only David Beckham and Ryan giggs had not just taken part in an international tournament.
There was Bobby Moore in 1966, when new Zealand speedway rider Barry Briggs remarkably edged out geoff Hurst to take second. not a single footballer won the prize again until Paul gascoigne, for his performance at the 1990 world Cup. Michael Owen won in 1998, a world Cup year, and Beckham three years later for the goal which gave england a shot at the 2002 tournament.
Cricket follows the same pattern. Cricketers have only won in the year of an Ashes summer.
This was one of the fallow years, with no such major event bar the London athletics world Championships in which Farah both won and lost. it is in years like this that the winners have tended to be left-field — giggs in 2009 and Mark Cavendish in 2011 — and the votes cast at their lowest.
Sir Mo was astonished. ‘ when you see that list and put yourself in there, you think, “i might finish top three, maybe”,’ he reflected when the feed was finally restored. His son’s intervention was ideal, confirming beyond any doubt that this increasingly lavish programme has nothing to do with sporting excellence. it is showbusiness.