The fact that Ryan Giggs won the 2009 prize should have been the death knell for the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award.
If Giggs, a Manchester United substitute footballer, was the best we could do, there was surely no point in pretending the award had any relevance other than to give Gary Lineker even more prime time opportunities to confirm his smugness and ability to utter awful puns without shame or embarrassment.
It’s not even as though Giggs has any personality. I am guessing his money and looks attracted his brother’s wife rather than any scintillating repartee.
And yet each time the greatest sporting year in our history celebrates another winner, talk inevitably turns to who will win the BBC prize.
I’m sure the athletes themselves are probably not even bothered.
Our golden Olympians have been roared to success by millions and been feted by thousands more on a parade around London.
Sitting in a cold, soulless studio in the north of England on a December night listening to Jake Humphrey shouting and hollering will, quite possibly, be an anti-climax to a glorious year.
Rory McIlroy is threatening world domination in golf and sleeps with a gorgeous professional tennis player.
After he’s helped Europe win the Ryder Cup later this month, winning a place on a 10-person shortlist alongside a couple of cyclists, may just seem a little trifling.
Anyway I’m convinced the cycling fraternity will hi-jack the event for the third time in five years in an attempt to restore some credibility to the most tarnished, most corrupt sporting event in the world.
Bradley Wiggins is one of the favourites to win the BBC prize this year (and to be fair at least he has a personality unlike last year’s winning peddler ‘Mumbling’ Mark Cavendish), but highlighting a first British winner of the Tour De France just months after the most successful rider in the event’s history was exposed as the latest in a long line of drugs cheats would not be ideal.
Incidentally after writing that last line I am now certain to be challenged to a bike race by cycling lovers as if beating me over 10 miles somehow confirms what a great sport they follow.
No, all this chatter about who will win a rather meaningless prize is good only for the BBC, pub bores and sports columnists lacking a good or original idea.
In that spirit I nominate Andy Murray as the most deserving winner of 2012.
Men’s tennis gets more spectacular by the year and some of the rallying in the US Open Final between Murray and Novak Djokovic was simply stunning.
Murray is a sour-faced sportsman for sure, but he’s also provided Great Britain with a first Grand Slam victory for 76 years in a major sport rather than a minority one.
If he doesn’t win then one of our Olympians or Paralympians should take the glory.
Mo Farah, Jessica Ennis, David Weir (not the Scottish footballer), Johnnie Peacock, Sarah Storey and Kath Grainger would be my alternative choices.
Anyone but Wiggins in fact.
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