Hamilton or Defoe ...which personality truly embodies the notion of a sporting hero?
MY dream job for the next month would be working on the BBC Sports Personality of The Year Awards.
Or rather, directing the promotion films that try to woo viewers’ votes, because I have an idea how to segue between two of the contenders for the top award: Lewis Hamilton and Jermain Defoe. Striker Defoe isn’t fourth favourite to win it due to the miracle of scoring 14 league goals in a David Moyes team, but for the love and devotion he gave to young Bradley Lowery, which helped raise awareness of the six-year-old’s courageous battle against cancer. We’ll long remember Bradley’s beautiful, beaming face as he clung on to his footballing hero as a mascot or in his hospital bed. He was diagnosed with neuroblastoma at 18 months, but the specialist treatment needed wasn’t available on the NHS. So, an appeal – helped by football fans as well as Sunderland and Everton – raised the £700,000 to send him to America. Money that was never spent as Bradley’s cancer was diagnosed as terminal before he could travel.
When Bradley died in July, his parents singled out Defoe for praise, but also thanked the wider footballing family and the “amazing” NHS staff.
If I were editing the BBC film, I’d interview doctors and nurses, asking them how much more we could have done for Bradley – and other seriously ill children – if our NHS was properly funded and we didn’t need to rely on the generosity of strangers for private treatment.
I’d then cut to Lewis Hamilton in Mexico, winning a fourth Formula 1 world title in his Mercedes, which made him second favourite for the Sports Personality of the Year title.
I’d weave in images of Lewis in other modes of transport, like his £16.5million red Bombardier jet, before showing a Panorama reporter informing us that Hamilton used shell companies in the British Virgin Islands, the Isle of Man and Guernsey to avoid the entire £3.3m VAT bill when he imported it from Canada in 2013.
And how he set up another tax-haven company to buy a £1.5m motor-home, which he also appears to have paid no VAT on.
I’d point out that Hamilton is contracted to Mercedes via a Guernsey company, has his image rights held in Malta and, for 10 years, has been a tax exile in Switzerland and Monaco.
A move that has allowed him to accrue, on last year’s estimates, a £131m personal fortune, thrusting him into the Forbes top-10 list of richest sportsmen in the world, with a jet-setting lifestyle he never ceases to showcase on Instagram.
Of course, I’d point out that, when it comes to the letter of the law, Hamilton has not acted criminally.
And if the man, who was born in a Stevenage NHS hospital and educated in a state school, feels he owes his country nothing and is happy to be part of an avoidance scam costing the UK Treasury many billions every year, that’s up to him.
To round the film off, though, I’d cut back to Bradley and air the emotional words spoken by Defoe when he died: “Goodbye, my friend, gonna miss you lots. You will never know what a difference you made to me as a person.”
Then ask what a difference Hamilton could have made to the lives of sick kids if he’d lived and paid his taxes in the nation whose flag he wraps himself in after every victory.
Before asking viewers what kind of person truly embodies the notion of a sporting hero?