Sports Personality Of The Year

Now that December has begun, the gritters are out in force in the north of England and already the doors of advent calendars are being opened are around the country, it means another end of year tradition is nearly upon us again. Yes, the BBC Sports Personality of the Year is about to be decided and for once, it should make for very interesting viewing.

Earlier this week, the BBC announced a shortlist of ten which the British voting public can vote for on the night of the ceremony, which is on Sunday week, 14 December. As you would expect, given the British Olympians' fantastic performance at the Beijing Games, the shortlist consists of several gold medal winners. From the pool, there is swimming's golden girl Rebecca Adlington, while Olympic 400 metre champion Christine Ohururogu makes the shortlist for the second year in succession. Sailor Ben Ainslie is rewarded for his third successive gold medal winning Games with a nomination as well, but the sport that has the strongest representation is cycling, unsurprising given how well Great Britain did in the velodrome at the Games. Chris Hoy is one of four candidates who use pedal power, with road race winner Nicole Cooke, Rebecca Romero and Bradley Wiggins completing cycling's quartet of candidates.

Despite the year being dominated by the Olympics and Britain's golden summer in the Far East, there are three sporting figures who make the shortlist as reward for their achievements during the year. Lewis Hamilton leads the charge and is the bookmakers' favourite to go one better on his second place finish last year having won Formula 1's World Drivers' Championship on the final lap of the final race of the season in what is only his second season in motor sport's blue riband competition. Meanwhile, last year's winner Joe Calzaghe finds himself on the shortlist again having stretched his unbeaten fight record to 46 bouts with his recent victory over Roy Jones Junior. Completing the magic ten is Andy Murray, reward for an excellent campaign which has seen Murray rise to number 4 in the world rankings, win two Masters Series tournaments and reach his first Grand Slam final on his favoured hard courts at the US Open.

Looking at the candidates, all of them have enjoyed an excellent year and all have achieved what they have this year through hard work, dedication and no shortage of sacrifices. Hamilton having made history by winning F1's Drivers' Championship in his second season and in doing so becoming the youngest ever winner of that coveted prize is justifiably the favourite and he would be a worthy winner if he does end up landing the prize. Yet, for all that, I feel Hamilton will have several more opportunities to win this accolade given his rich talent and ruthless determination, especially as he develops more mental maturity and experience makes him stronger. As long as he has a competitive car and a clean bill of health, I expect him to be capable of winning several more Drivers' Championships, even allowing for the strong competition he faces in his sport from the likes of Fernando Alonso, Kimi Raikkonen, Felipe Massa, Sebastien Vettel and Robert Kubica. Hamilton will define another sporting year and be in contention again. That is not to disparage his excellent achievement this year, but to say that the defining sporting achievements and memories so far as this sporting year are concerned were made in Beijing.

Of the seven Olympians who have been nominated on the shortlist, the achievements of three in particular I feel stand out from the crowd. Firstly in the pool, Rebecca Adlington's double gold medal haul was the stuff of dreams. Coming into the Games, Adlington was seen as a medal prospect by those within the Olympic swimming camp, but her previous performances did not provide any pointers for what was to come. Firstly, Adlington won the 400 metres Freestyle with a determined finish and just got home for gold. This was not Adlington's favoured event and so her victory was all the more unexpected. In winning, Adlington became the first British woman to win an Olympic gold medal in the pool since Anita Lonsborough in 1960.

But, then came her crowning glory. She won the gold medal in the 800 metres freestyle, one of the endurance events so far as competition swimming is concerned. I remember watching the final live in the early hours of the morning and what I saw was one of the most remarkable feats of this sporting year. Adlington led the race all the way and she blew the rest of the field to shreds. It showed great confidence and audacity on her part to have the belief in her body to make all the running, knowing that she would have enough left in the latter stages to get home. But, it worked spectacularly well and in winning her second gold, Adlington broke Janet Evans' world record by nearly three seconds. At the time, this was her sport's longest standing world record and it had stood for 20 years. Adlington did not just break the record, she shattered it, and unless Adlington breaks the record again herself, you would think it would be some time before anyone else breaks her record.

Adlington at just 19 is quite likely to still be around in 2012 to add to her gold medal haul and that may present her with another opportunity to win this award. But it is worth bearing in mind that Adlington was not widely expected to achieve the success she had in Beijing and so in four years time, she may not have the same level of form or fitness required to get the golds again. On the whole, swimmers tend to peak at an early age and this is particularly the case where female swimmers are concerned. Sharron Davies won a silver medal at the Moscow Olympics when she was just 17 years old and she retired from her sport at the age of 20, before making a comeback several years later. Adlington is a young woman in the limelight now with all the trappings that go with it. The intrusion on her privacy may see her wish for a quieter life, or it is possible that having made the sacrifices in order to reach the top of her sport, she might wish to retreat and do the things that other 19-20 year old girls do.

It is hard to say where her future will take her, but Adlington will surely find it difficult to top the year she has just had. Added to which, she will also appeal to those observers who point out that the trophy is called "Sports Personality Of The Year". Sometimes, there are a contingent, I must say that I am not one myself, but there are a contingent who would disregard some of the great sporting achievers for this trophy because their focused, ruthless approach to winning means that they appear surly or dull and therefore short of a personality. Whatever floats your boat, but in Adlington's case she ticks all the boxes. Not only is she a very determined athlete who has achieved great success, but she also comes across a very bubbly, down to earth girl who seems like great fun. If people are using this human quality as a criteria for winning this award then Adlington is surely a major contender.

The other two Olympians who deserve special mention are both from the velodrome. Chris Hoy won three gold medals at the Beijing Games in total, including two in individual competition as well as an additional gold in the team sprint competition. This haul of golds added to the gold that Hoy had already won at the Athens games in 2004 as well as a silver medal in Sydney in 2000. Such an amount of golds put Hoy in the realms of British Olympic legends status, along with five time Olympic gold medal winner Sir Steve Redgrave. Hoy will be 36 in 2012 and although the physical demands of training for his sport could have caught up with him by then, so long as Hoy's body holds up and his single mindedness remains intact, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that Hoy could win gold medal number five in London and then get a tap on the shoulder from the postage stamp head of the day.

It was interesting to see that the aforementioned Redgrave had championed Hoy as his winner of the award for this year. I am sure that Redgrave sees in Hoy a man made of the same stuff as he was in his competitive days. Both compete in physically demanding sports that require total dedication, getting up early on cold mornings with a stiff back to go training. Hoy, like Redgrave, seems to be held up as the benchmark in his sport who everyone else looks up to and is inspired by. Whether Hoy wins this award or not, he will leave a fantastic legacy in his sport when he retires and will encourage the next generation of Olympians to pass their cycling proficiency test and get on the saddle competitively.

The third person I will single out is not as heralded as much as either Adlington or Hoy, but her achievement is every bit as remarkable. I am talking about Rebecca Romero, who won gold in the women's individual pursuit at the Beijing Games. This was a sensational achievement for Romero, given that she had only been participating in the sport for two years. Four years earlier, Romero had been part of Britain's Olympic rowing team where she won silver as part of the quad sculls team. She was forced to retire from rowing soon afterwards due to injury but then took up cycling in 2006. The rest is history.

In the final of the pursuit in Beijing, she defeated fellow Briton Wendy Houvenaghel for the gold medal and in doing so became the first British woman in modern times to win Olympic medals in two completely different sports. She was recently asked whether she would compete in a third sport in 2012 and said she was giving it strong consideration. Should Romero go ahead and do this and end up getting a medal of any colour, she could rightly consider herself among Britain's finest ever Olympians.

Romero is not everyone's cup of tea personality wise. To many people, she is seen as aloof, over-opinionated and selfish. I dare say she probably has all of these traits. Even by her own admission, she said that one thing she prefers about cycling to rowing is that she prefers competing in an individual sport so that she is only accountable to herself and her own performance. These are words that perhaps do not sit well with everybody. But two things. Firstly, give credit to Romero for her honesty in saying this. Some people simply are more suited to working individually than working in a team. Secondly, the very traits which rub some people up the wrong way are likely to also be contributory factors in her being the single minded winner that she is. Take away some of these traits and you take away her edge. And without that edge, her extraordinary achievements would probably not have happened.

Of the rest of the candidates not already mentioned, Joe Calzaghe had his glory in winning this accolade last year and his subsequent victories over Bernard Hopkins and Roy Jones Junior further confirm his place among boxing's greats. But he was validated for an extraordinary career in winning this award last year and so given the remarkable achievements elsewhere, he is unlikely to win again this year, even allowing for his increased popularity with the public. Andy Murray has had a breakthrough year which has seen him establish himself as a genuine contender for winning Grand Slam tournaments, certainly on hard surfaces. But he now needs to take things to the next level and win a Slam in order to win this award. I am pretty certain that provided he stays fit, his time will come. Christine Ohururogu showed great guts to win her gold medal in the 400 metres but a section of the public still regard her as a "drugs cheat" because of her three missed tests and this was reflected in her lack of support when up for the award last year. Given her competition this time around, it is hard to see her faring much better this time.

In all likelihood, I expect Lewis Hamilton to win the public votes and therefore take the main prize. But in terms of who I would vote for, I would look to vote for whose achievement defined this sporting year, and by the same token, which sportsperson was most defined by this year. This leads me back to the Olympics and so for me, it is a straight choice between Hoy and Adlington. I suppose for some people, the fact they compete in "minority" or "non-mainstream" sports will count against them. I find this quite a sad and myopic reflection that people look at achievements in this way. Just because these sports are not on the television every week does not make them any less worthy, and let's face it, there are some more mainstream sports where British success has been sadly lacking in recent times.

It is a tough call because I think both Hoy and Adlington have had a remarkable year and both would be worthy winners for what they have achieved. If coerced to make a choice though then I would choose Rebecca Adlington. Having never been much of a swimmer myself, I have always had a healthy respect for those that reach the pinnacle of achievement in the pool and as a sports fan, when I watched Adlington break the world record in the 800 metres freestyle in Beijing, I thought I had witnessed something extremely special. She had destroyed a top class field and shattered a long standing world record. Adlington may never have another year like 2008, just as Jonathan Edwards never matched his magnificent triple jump performances of 1995 in his career thereafter. Chris Hoy's multiple gold medal haul certainly deserves recognition too, but maybe the twilight in 2012 will bring about a fitting finale. Messrs Hamilton and Murray will both define a sporting year one day, while Calzaghe defined the sporting year of 2007.

Deciding who should win the big prize should seem a doddle though when compared to deciding who should win the Overseas Sports Personality of the Year. For me, there are three outstanding candidates, all of whom have very justifiable reasons for why they should win the award. Firstly, there is Rafael Nadal, who has enjoyed his most successful year in the sport to date and brought about a shift in the power structure at the top of the men's game. Nadal won his fourth straight French Open on the clay of Roland Garros, thereby confirming himself as the undisputed king of that surface, in many people's eyes he is the finest clay court player of all time. If winning in Paris was a formality, winning his first title at Wimbledon was anything but. Nonetheless, Nadal made it third time lucky against his great rival Roger Federer in the final in what surely was the greatest tennis match of all time. This victory confirmed Rafael Nadal as the new world number 1 and as if all this was not enough, Nadal capped off his year by winning the gold medal in the Olympics.

Nadal is now established as one of the world's top athletes and watching him charging around court at times is pure poetry. But the frightening thing is that his best is probably yet to come. If he avoids injury, he could set all kinds of records in the French Open. But he also now looks like the man to beat at Wimbledon too, although his enduring rivalry with Federer will be renewed again next year with Federer eager to show that his relatively disappointing 2008 was a blip and that he is not a fading force just yet. For Nadal to really demonstrate his greatness, he needs to put in more of a show in the hard court Slams. He has yet to advance past the semi-finals of either the Australian or US Opens and that will surely be an area he will look to improve upon next year. Even so, Nadal has had an incredible year and would be a worthy Overseas Personality of the Year, especially for his part in the epic sporting contest of the year.

Having declared my admiration for top swimmers, it will come as no surprise that I advocate Michael Phelps as a genuine candidate for this award. Phelps simply has confirmed himself as one of the greatest Olympians of all time, having won eight gold medals in Beijing to add to the six that he had won in Athens. There will be some snobbery in certain quarters with people saying that it was easy for Phelps to win so many gold medals because of the number of events and strokes there are to compete in, but I disagree with that line of thought and in fact I think it makes his achievement all the more special. Including all the heats, semi-finals and then the finals that Phelps must have swum in in order to win his gold medals, he must have participated in over 20 races during the course of the Beijing Olympics. Factor in that this involved swimming over a number of different distances and changing from stroke to stroke and that Phelps's eight gold medals also resulted in him or his team breaking the world record in seven events and the Olympic record in the other, you get some idea at how phenomenal Phelps's achievement was.

That Phelps is now regarded as the greatest swimmer of all time is a no-brainer. He just needs to count his medals in order to prove that he is. But by winning so prolifically in front of a world audience, he has become a sporting icon and his success and status significantly transcends his sport. Just as Mark Spitz's seven gold medals at the Munich Olympics of 1972 have kept him in the pages of Olympic folklore since he retired, so Michael Phelps will still be mentioned in 30 years time and probably 50 years time. Given that the number of swimming events are likely to be reduced rather than increased in future Olympics, it is going to be a very long time before Phelps sees his medal haul surpassed by another swimmer. Not bad at all for a man who when he was a child was picked on for wearing a brace on his teeth.

Nadal and Phelps's achievements this year would win this award in the vast majority of years. In fact, credit too to Padraig Harrington who became the first European to successfully defend the Open Championship golf title for over 30 years and followed that up by also winning the US PGA Championship. His achievements in another year would have received greater recognition. But this has been no ordinary sporting year and there is one bolt from the blue who will in all likelihood ensure that messrs Nadal, Phelps and Harrington will not be adorning their mantlepiece this year with the Overseas Personality award.

This bolt, of course is Usain Bolt. At the start of the year, it is unlikely that too many eyes will have been cast on Bolt having the Olympics that he ended up having. Tyson Gay and Bolt's compatriot Asafa Powell came into 2008 as the two sprinters who most seasoned followers of the sprint events would have identified as the chief candidates and when Bolt broke the 100 metres world record in the run-up to the Olympics, it was the first time that his name had come into the wider public consciousness. But this world record was just a prelude for what was to come.

Bolt's 100 metres victory and world record at Beijing seems relatively routine now, yet to think back to it, what is all the more remarkable is how Bolt eased up towards the line with the race won and yet still ended up breaking the world record. It is frightening to think what sort of time Bolt could record over 100 metres if he ran flat out, but one can only hope that in time Bolt runs a race where he does run flat out so we can see what time he could clock under those circumstances. Needless to say, I think it would result in a world record that would take a long time to beat.

If the casual nature in which Bolt won the 100 metres was not enough, his victory in the 200 metres will linger long in the memory. One of my sporting heroes when I was younger was Michael Johnson and I can recall the night that he won the 200 metres at the Atlanta Olympics and shattered the world record to boot. It was the night of my eighteenth birthday and I remember coming home from a few celebratory coming of age beverages to see Johnson make history running in his gold spikes. That night he ran 200 metres in 19.32 seconds and I remembered thinking that in order to run that time, if you split the race into two halves, in at least one half he would have had to have shattered the 100 metres record of the time, which was quite something given that Johnson never ran the 100 metres.

I expected that by the time anyone broke Johnson's 200 metres record, I would be at least double the age I was at the time when he set the record. But I had reckoned without anyone as incredible as Bolt coming along and clearly setting his eyes not just on winning the race but breaking the record. Bolt ran the race of his life in the 200 metres final and showed more intensity in running this race than he did in the 100 metres. It was as though he knew he could run 100 metres but that the 200 metres would require more of an effort. The extra effort he put in saw him shave two one-hundredths of a second off of Johnson's twelve year record and one of athletics' most difficult records to break had been taken. One great athlete from a previous generation had seen his record taken by a great athlete from a new generation. Perfect symmetry, as Keane might say.

Bolt rounded off his incredible Olympics by anchoring the Jamaican 4 x 100 relay team to gold and another world record and in completing this hat-trick of golds and world records, became the first male track and field athlete since Carl Lewis in 1984 to win three separate golds in the course of the same Olympics. His results and records speak for themselves and at 22, you would hope and expect that this is just the beginning of the Usain Bolt story. By the time he has finished, he has the potential to rewrite the record books time and again, and set a daunting target for whoever follows him.

But it is not just Bolt's medals and his times that should see him win this accolade. It is the manner in which he has done it. He is an icon for his sport at a time when his sport has been crying out for one. His approach to racing has been so refreshing and so laid back, you would be forgiven for thinking he was just out having a casual training run given how calm and sure of himself he was on the track. Bolt's personable character allied with his extraordinary achievements have provided his sport and his country with a true icon and given how athletics has been badly tarnished by drugs cheats in recent years, Bolt's success and profile provides athletics with a much needed shot in the arm which hopefully will see more athletics followers reignite their love for the sport and give youngsters a hero to aspire to. For his country too, Bolt's success will rekindle the Jamaican public's love for its sport after a barren few years so far as team sports have been concerned.

Above all though, when I think back on the sporting year of 2008, as much as I will remember the Nadal-Federer final at Wimbledon as the best tennis match of all time and as much as I will long remember Michael Phelps's astonishing achievements in the pool, above all I will remember it for seeing Usain Bolt tear up the pages of history on the track, leaving everyone trailing in his wake and setting records that I am sure will only serve as a platform for the rest of his career, which by the time he has finished, will stand the test of time. And Bolt did it all with what seemed to me like a naive enjoyment of what he was doing and of life itself. It sends out a fantastic message if you can enjoy your work and Bolt did that in front of a television audience of many millions. For that reason, I hope he wins the main award, although I certainly respect the merits of both Nadal and Phelps taking this award.

So, Adlington for the main award and Bolt for the Overseas Personality would be my personal choice and if Manchester United could land the Team of the Year award for their Premier League and Champions League double, then things would be perfect. Nonetheless, I think the British Olympic cycling team are just as deserving having exceeded all expectations in Beijing and showing that Britain at this time is the nation to fear in the velodrome. The investment in infrastructure and in the individual riders that has come as a result of Lottery funding has paid dividends twentyfold and in years to come, Britain will surely achieve further success as a result of the next generation of cyclists being inspired by the efforts of Chris Hoy, Bradley Wiggins, Rebecca Romero, Victoria Pendleton, et al.

Whether my personal selections end up winning the awards this year or not, after a few years in the doldrums, the sporting success of the year should at least ensure that Sports Personality of the Year is a showpiece event again this year and that the programme for once does not drag. Long may the sporting success continue, as in times of difficulty and depression elsewhere, it does at least provide people with something to momentarily cheer them up when Britain does well.