BBC turns down Tyson Fury's request to be removed from Spoty shortlist
The BBC Sports Personality of the Year award descended into confusion and then farce on Wednesday after the corporation rejected a demand from the world heavyweight champion Tyson Fury to be the first ever athlete to be taken off its shortlist.
The BBC’s decision came after the controversial fighter took to social media to claim that he didn’t need any “verification” from awards before imploring his supporters not to vote for him. But after several hours of crisis talks the BBC insisted that Fury, who is the third favourite for the award behind the Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton and the snooker champion Ronnie O’Sullivan, would remain on its six-strong shortlist.
“The shortlist is decided by an independent expert panel who choose contenders based on their sporting achievement in a given year,” a BBC spokesperson said. “On this basis Tyson Fury will remain on the list for SPOTY 2020. As always the winner will be decided by the public voting during the live show and it is of course up to Tyson if he chooses to participate in the show.”
Fury, who was also joined on the shortlist by Stuart Broad, Jordan Henderson and Hollie Doyle, started the controversy earlier on Wednesday with a post on his Instagram account.
“This is a message for bbcsport and their SPOTY award - please take me off your list as I’m the people’s champion and have no need for verification or any awards,” he wrote. “I know who I am and what I’ve done in the sport.
I have the love of the people which means more to me than all the awards in the world. To anyone who supports me, don’t vote.”
Fury’s initial inclusion had sparked controversy given he has previously served a two-year doping ban and is under active investigation by the UK Anti-Doping Agency following allegations that a member of Tyson Fury’s team offered a farmer £25,000 to provide a false defence after the heavyweight champion failed a drug test in 2015.
Fury and his cousin Hughie both blamed their positive tests for nandrolone on eating uncastrated wild boar or ingesting contaminated supplements – citing two defence statements from the Preston farmer Martin Carefoot saying he had given them the meat.
In March, however, Carefoot changed his story, telling the Mail on Sunday that he provided two false statements after being offered a financial inducement by a member of Fury’s team to lie. Fury’s subsequent promoter, Frank Warren, described the allegations as “total bullshit”.
This is only the second time in the history of the awards that a shortlisted athlete has asked to be removed from the shortlist. In 2015 the Olympic long jump champion Greg Rutherford wrote a private letter to the BBC because he felt uncomfortable being part of the ceremony with Fury – who earlier that year had claimed that “there are only three things that need to be accomplished before the Devil comes home. One of them is homosexuality being legal in countries, one of them is abortion and the other is paedophilia.”
Rutherford, whose sister is gay, was eventually persuaded to take part in the ceremony after his letter was leaked. But in his autobiography he admitted he wishes he hadn’t changed his mind. “I didn’t enjoy it one bit,” he wrote. “I turned up late and left as soon as I possibly could.”