In what will be probably the strongest shortlist ever?
Loathe it, hate it or just feel annually irritated by it, the BBC Sport Personality of the Year award has continued to exercise its own tenaciously parochial fascination. Even more so this year when, after an unprecedented glut of British sporting success, the shortlist for the award looks not just giddily oversubscribed, but also oddly challenging for an institution that tends to reward sporting stars of a very distinct timbre and tone.
This is, after all, a gong claimed in the past by both Zara Phillips and Princess Anne, won twice apiece by Nigel Mansell and Damon Hill, and one that would, if rules allowed, award itself every year to a gene-splicing amalgam of Steven Redgrave, Seb Coe and the colour beige.
Not so this year. The current favourite is Bradley Wiggins, Tour de France winner and Olympic gold medallist, followed by Andy Murray and double Olympic gold medallist Mo Farah. These are riches indeed, particularly after that recent period when the award almost seemed an exercise in semantic perversity, rewarding those who were neither endowed with personality nor overwhelmingly good at sport, what we might call The Rusedski Years.
More than this, the favourites are all athletes of a rather non-U personality type. Wiggins is a potty-mouthed non-conformist who after receiving a royal telegram this summer said: "Fuck the Queen – Johnny Marr's sent me a message on Twitter." Murray has long irritated some with his angular manner and his inexcusable failure to be born in Surrey. More dismally, the London-raised Farah has been forced to justify his own Britishness: even in the glow of Olympic triumph one journalist asked if he'd rather be running for Somalia (Farah's response – "Look mate, this is my country" – was one of the moments of the summer).
At the end of which there is an opportunity for the SPOTY to demonstrate that it can be more than a self-serving irrelevance stewarded by a clique of home counties telephone voters, as it did to a degree last year by rewarding the cyclist Mark Cavendish. There are other fine contenders in Jessica Ennis, David Weir and Jonnie Peacock, all of whom would help rescue the award from accusations of inanity, cosiness and that familiar nepotism of niceness. It has been a great year for British sport. Here's a chance to stop the BBC electorate mucking it up right at the last.
