SPotY continues to appeal to the lowest common denominator

This year’s BBC Sports Personality of the Year (SPotY) awards take place on December 19th at the LG Arena in Birmingham. Over the coming weeks, we will be gently reminded about the leading contenders for the main SPotY award by the BBC, but as usual there will be a few merit-worthy candidates who are bound to miss out on the final shortlist of ten.

I will look at some of the outsiders shortly, but here is a summary of the top ten candidates for the main SPotY award according to Ladbrokes, as of yesterday:

Tony McCoy (6/5 favourite) – The dominant force in National Hunt racing for the past 15 years, the best jump jockey in the business finally won the Grand National in 2010, at his 15th attempt, piloting Don’t Push It to a five-length victory.

Graeme McDowell (9/4) – The 31-year old won his first major, the US Open, this year, as well as holding his nerve to win the critical final singles match in the Ryder Cup, securing the trophy for Europe.

Jessica Ennis (14/1) – Followed up last year’s World Athletics Championships heptathlon victory with gold medals in both the World Indoor Championships pentathlon and the European Championships heptathlon. She remains the world’s number one-ranked heptathlete.

Tom Daley (20/1) – Still only 16, Daley bagged double Commonwealth Games gold in the 10m platform individual and synchronised diving competitions, after injury denied him the chance to defend his European title.

Lee Westwood (20/1) – The new world number one was runner-up in both the US Masters and The Open, and contributed 2½ points from his four matches as Europe regained the Ryder Cup.

Phil Taylor (20/1) – The undisputed king of darts won his 15th World Championship and 11th World Matchplay title in 2010, among others. Incredibly, he has only been nominated for SPotY once before (2006).

Lewis Hamilton (25/1) – Winner of three grands prix to date in the 2010 season, and currently lies third in the drivers’ championship, 21 points behind with a maximum of 50 still available from the final two races. Has blotted his copybook with individual errors in recent races, though.

Graeme Swann (25/1) – 51 wickets in ten Tests this calendar year, including five five-fors, cementing his position as England’s primary bowling threat. Also named the ECB Cricketer of the Year, and nominated as one of Wisden‘s five Cricketers of the Year.

Amy Williams (25/1) – Gold medalist in the skeleton bob at the Vancouver Winter Olympics.

Colin Montgomerie (25/1) – Winning captain of the European Ryder Cup team.

With no Olympic Games, World Athletics Championships or World Cups in rugby union or cricket this year, and with England flopping miserably at the football World Cup, it has hardly been a banner year for UK sport. Which makes the absence of the following four sportspeople from Ladbrokes’ current top ten list all the more baffling:

Mo Farah (image courtesy of Wikipedia)

Mo Farah (33/1)

The Somali-born British long distance runner claimed gold medals in both the 5,000m and 10,000m at the European Athletics Championships. In so doing, he became the first Briton to win the European title at the longer event, and only the fifth man ever to complete the European 5,000m/10,000m double. He also won this year’s London 10,000 road race, beating 10km world record holder Micah Kogo, in a British road record time of 27:44.

In events which are still largely dominated by African runners, the 27-year old Farah is Britain’s first truly world-class track distance runner since the heady days of the early 1980s, when David Moorcroft was the 5,000m world record holder.

Farah may well sneak into the ten-strong shortlist for SPotY. He won’t get anywhere near the final three, though.

Beth Tweddle (image courtesy of Wikipedia)

Beth Tweddle (33/1)

Tweddle won her third gold medal at the World Artistic Gymnastics Championships in Rotterdam last month with a flawless performance on her favourite apparatus, the uneven bars, having triumphed in the same event in 2006 and on the floor last year.

She also repeated her double gold performance at the European Championships in Birmingham earlier in the year, duplicating her 2009 wins in the uneven bars and the floor.

The 25-year old is almost single-handedly responsible for boosting the popularity of the sport in the UK, and remains Britain’s only ever world champion gymnast. She previously placed third in the SPotY voting in 2006 behind winner Zara Phillips and Darren Clarke.

Tweddle will probably be included in the final list of ten for the SPotY ceremony. She may even get close to the final three. But she won’t win.

Mark Cavendish (image courtesy of Graham Watson)

Mark Cavendish (66/1)

It is all too easy to run out of superlatives when describing the dominant sprinter in road cycling. Winner of five stages at July’s Tour de France, he then added a further three stage wins and the green jersey (for winning the points competition) in his debut at the Vuelta a España in September. As in the previous two years, he has unquestionably been the world’s fastest finisher again this year – and this in a year where he has at times struggled for peak form.

In four years as a pro, the rider from the Isle of Man has already won an astonishing 23 stages in the three Grand Tours – including 15 at the Tour de France – not to mention the 2009 Milan-San Remo, one of the most prestigious one-day classics on the cycling calendar.

Cav is the best in the world at what he does. He has yet to make the SPotY shortlist. That is an incredible oversight which says much about how populist the selection process is.

Chrissie Wellington (image courtesy of chrissiewellington.org)

Chrissie Wellington (100/1)

33-year old Chrissie Wellington is the queen of ironman events. She is one of only three women to have won three consecutive times (2007-09) at the Ironman World Championships – and might well have won a fourth had she not had to withdraw at the last minute due to illness.

Nonetheless, Wellington remains undefeated in competition over the full ironman distance (2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike, 26.2-mile marathon run), and has won all three ironman/half-ironman events in which she has competed this year. In the past two years, she has taken 26 minutes off the women’s ironman-distance world record, lowering it to 8:19:13.

Ladbrokes rate Wellington’s chances of winning the main SPotY award at 100/1. Of course, she won’t win – like 2009 World Triathlon Champion Alistair Brownlee she probably won’t even make the shortlist – but it does seem somewhat ridiculous that a British athlete who has dominated her sport for a number of years is rated at the same odds as Audley Harrison. Go figure.

Of course, the final SPotY shortlist will almost certainly be different from Ladbrokes’ current top ten, but I fully expect the likes of Cavendish and Wellington to miss out no matter what. It’s not that I think they should necessarily win Sports Personality of the Year. But what is a terrible shame is that they will not even make the shortlist and will therefore not be exposed to a national audience, whereas other, arguably much less deserving sportspeople, will be listed simply because they compete in a high-profile sport. Does that automatically make them more worthy? Of course not.

If the BBC wants to make SPotY a true reflection of British sporting achievement – especially in a year where there has been so little of note to celebrate – then it should widen its net beyond the usual suspects and recognise the existence of Mark Cavendish and Chrissie Wellington, both of whom stand firmly on top of the world in their chosen disciplines.

You know it will never happen, though. In the meantime, I will be casting my vote for Beth Tweddle.

The week in numbers: w/e 22/8/10

Graeme Swann

23 – Graeme Swann took his 100th Test wicket in last week’s defeat to Pakistan, his 23rd match. He is tied with Derek Underwood as the fastest post-war English spinner to 100 wickets. Shane Warne also took 23 Tests to complete his first century.

110 – Runs scored by opener Alastair Cook in England’s second innings, four more than he had scored in total in his previous eight Test innings this summer.

3 – Goals conceded by Tottenham in the first 28 minutes of the away leg of their Champions League qualifier against Swiss side Young Boys. Spurs recovered to 3-2 to give them a good chance of progressing to the group stage, which starts in mid-September.

14 – New Zealand‘s late comeback against South Africa in Saturday’s 29-22 victory was their 14th consecutive win and clinched the 2010 Tri-Nations title.

18 – Number of gold medals won by Great Britain‘s disabled swimming team at the IPC World Swimming Championships. Eleanor Simmonds added four golds to her two from the Beijing Paralympics.

David Rudisha

1:41.09 – New world record time for the 800 metres set by Kenya’s David Rudisha in Berlin on Sunday afternoon. He beat the previous record by 0.02s, which had been held by Denmark’s Kenyan-born Wilson Kipketer since 1997.

28 – Years that David Moorcroft‘s British 5,000 metres record of 13:00.41 had stood before Mo Farah recorded a time of 12:57.94 at Thursday’s Diamond League meeting in Zurich.

18 – Number of games for which the French Football Federation has banned Nicolas Anelka over his conduct at the World Cup, from which he was sent home after a row with former national coach Raymond Domenech.

1 – The first yellow card of the German Bundesliga season was shown to Mark van Bommel. Old habits die hard.

The Premier League week in numbers

James Milner

126,000,000 – Estimated amount spent by Man City so far in the summer transfer window, following the signing of James Milner from Aston Villa (with Stephen Ireland going the other way in part exchange).

99,750,000 – Estimated total value of kit sponsorship deals which will be earned by the 20 Premier League clubs this year alone, according to Sporting Intelligence research. This compares with a total of £71.8m for last season.

5 – Theo Walcott became the fifth Arsenal player to score a hat-trick in a competitive match at the Emirates Stadium. The other four are Jay Simpson (who joined Hull City last week), Emmanuel Adebayor, Carlos Vela and Nicklas Bendtner.

1971 – The last time Arsenal played a league game against Blackpool was in their first Double-winning season of 1970/71. (They won both games that season with identical 1-0 scorelines.)

16 – By beating Blackburn 2-1, Birmingham extended their run of unbeaten home games to 16.

25 – in taking charge of the Birmingham vs Blackburn match, Michael Oliver became the youngest referee in Premier League history, aged 25 years 182 days.

Kieron Dyer - sick-note

77 – Kieron Dyer played 77 minutes in West Ham‘s 3-1 loss to Bolton. It is the first time he has completed over 75 minutes in a Premier League match since 25th August 2007 (vs Wigan).

2 – Bolton are unbeaten in their opening two league fixtures for the first time since 2006.

0 – There were no corners in the Wigan v Chelsea game.

20-0 – Aggregate score in Chelsea’s last three Premier League games, including the final weekend of last season (8-0 vs Wigan, 6-0 vs West Brom, 6-0 vs Wigan).

0-18 – Aggregate score in Wigan’s last three Premier League games, including the final weekend of last season (0-8 vs Chelsea, 0-4 vs Blackpool, 0-6 vs Chelsea). Next week they travel to Spurs, where they lost 9-1 last season.

70 – Chelsea have scored 70 league goals in 20 Premier League games in 2010, at an average of 3.5 goals per game.

13 – Newcastle‘s 6-0 win over Aston Villa was the 13th time they have scored five or more goals in a single Premier League game.

150 – Paul Scholes scored his 150th goal for Man Utd in the 2-2 draw at Fulham.

2 – Prior to tonight’s match between Man City and Liverpool, only two teams have yet to score this season: Man City and Wigan.

2 – Prior to tonight’s match, only two teams have yet to conceded a goal this season: Man City and Chelsea.

4 – There were only been 16 6-0 scorelines in the first 18 seasons of the Premier League, an average of 0.89 per season. There have already been four this season, three of them this weekend.

6 – After 19 games of the 2010/11 season, 6-0 is the most common score (four times), ahead of 2-1 (three times).

(Some statistics courtesy of @OptaJoe, @optajim, @OptaJean and @StatManJon.)

Related Articles

• Kenya’s David Rudisha smashes 800m world record at Berlin meeting (telegraph.co.uk)
• Rudisha breaks 800m world record (news.bbc.co.uk)

The week in numbers: w/e 1/8/10

19 – Total number of medals won by the Great Britain team (six gold, seven silver, six bronze) at the European Athletics Championships in Barcelona, one better than the previous championship best of 18 at Split in 1990.

Mo Farah

1 – Mo Farah‘s victory in the 10,000 metres was Britain’s first-ever gold medal in the event. It was also Farah’s first major championship title.

17.81 – Distance (in metres) jumped by Phillips Idowu to win the gold medal in the triple jump. It was a lifetime best by the British athlete.

6,823 – Total points accumulated by Jessica Ennis in winning the heptathlon, setting a new European Championships record. Ennis beat Olympic champion Nataliya Dobrynska of Ukraine into second place by just 45 points.

726 – As of Sunday, days remaining until the start of the 2012 London Olympics – July 27th was the ‘two years to go’ milestone.

James Anderson

11/71 – James Anderson‘s combined return in the first Test match as England defeated Pakistan by 354 runs at Trent Bridge. He took 5/54 in the first innings and followed it up with 6/17 in the second, as the visitors were dismissed for just 80.

20 – After Sunday’s Hungarian GP, the points separating Mark Webber (161 points), the Formula 1 championship leader, from Fernando Alonso in fifth (141) – less than the 25 on offer for a race win.

45 – Points difference after the first period in the AFL local derby between the Fremantle Dockers and the West Coast Eagles – 7.6 (48) vs 0.3 (3). The match finished 160-85 in favour of Fremantle.

0 – Total transfer fees paid for central defender Sol Campbell during his professional career – all his moves have come on a free transfer. He signed for Newcastle on Wednesday, having previously played for Tottenham, Arsenal, Portsmouth and Notts County before a second stint at Arsenal last season.