Lizzy’s humbled to be up for personality of the year
cmcwethy@thekmgroup.co.uk Olympic champion Lizzy Yarnold has beaten the best in her field and now she’s taking on the cream of sporting talent in the UK.
She has been nominated for BBC Sports Personality of the Year, after scooping Britain’s first gold medal of the winter games at Sochi with a win in the women’s skeleton competition.
The former Maidstone Girls Grammar School student will be going up against the likes of Formula 1 double world champion Lewis Hamilton and fourtime Major-winning golfer Rory McIlroy for the accolade, which will be decided by public vote.
The 26-year-old, who grew up in West Kingsdown, said: “I am so excited to be nominated for the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year award – it is one of those programmes that you have watched your whole life and I can remember seeing it as a kid and thinking it was the coolest thing! To be acknowledged in this way is really humbling.” But when asked who she thought deserved the title, she picked long distance runner Jo Pavey.
She became the oldest woman ever to claim gold at a European Championships when she won the 10,000m in Zurich at the age of 40.
Lizzy said: “I was watching it on telly, and was with her the whole way through.
“It didn’t really matter whether she won it or not: it was just about proving that at her age she could still be one of the world’s best.”
She’s been shortlisted alongside another Kent sportswoman, Medway skier Charlotte Evans, who is a guide to visually-impaired skier Kelly Gallagher. Together they won Paralympic GB team’s first-ever winter gold medal, in the visually impaired Super-G in Sochi.
Other nominees include Gareth Bale, Charlotte Dujardin, Carl Froch, Jo Pavey, Adam Peaty and Max Whitlock, with the winner revealed on BBC1 on Sunday, December 14.
The candidates were chosen by an expert 12-member panel made up of Olympians Rebecca Adlington and Denise Lewis, Paralympian Baroness Tanni GreyThompson, TV executives and journalists.