Antepost

Put December 19 in your diary as this is the day you can fill your stockings on the back of the annual whitewash, which is the Sports Personality of the Year Awards.
The British Broadcasting Corporation has televised this event and organised both the nomination of the main protagonists and the public voting since 1954.
On the exterior the BBC is one of the last great bastions of an imperial nation, standing for all that is good and great. It declares its mission is “to inform, educate and entertain” with six public purposes: sustaining citizenship and civil society; promoting education and learning; stimulating creativity and cultural excellence; representing the UK, its nations, religions and communities; and bringing the UK to the world and the world to the UK.
Of course it is a load of old tosh. The world’s leading pastime, poker, has never been seen on a BBC screen and I believe it falls into at least a few of the above criteria.
Similarly there is no fair and equal representation amongst the Sports Personality of the Year Award show which explains why horse racing has only received a short pre-recorded highlights piece during the broadcast of the show in recent years.
Conversely, in 2008 say, cycling received an inordinate amount of coverage with an artificial racing surface, starting ramps, and space-aged bikes all rolled out before the live studio audience boosting ultimate winner, Chris Hoy’s prospects of collecting the award.
With 2010 not being an Olympic year — a gold medal wining Olympian also won the SPoY award in 2004 & 2000 — it would appear unlikely that another bike track or a couple of thousand gallons of water in a makeshift lake will be brought into the studio.
During a year featuring few notable sporting achievements on a world stage the one big question is the true prospect of 15-time Champion Jockey Tony McCoy winning the prestigious award which he jumped to the head of the betting for in April when landing the Grand National on Don’t Push It.
I declare very little and he rates a massive lay at his current odds of even-money.
Don’t get me wrong I like the fella a lot. I lived on the periphery of Toby Balding’s stables when a young McCoy was riding for him as the yard’s 7lb claimer in the early 90s. Just last month I found myself alongside the 36-year-old Northern Irishman on a flight into Heathrow where he was kind enough to give me a full insight into the career of this year’s Champion Hurdle winner — and the 2011 Champion Hurdle winner I hasten to add — Binocular.
McCoy should win the Award, he deserves to win it but romanticising about a sport which you are passionate is not the way to win money only lose it.
Undoubtedly, if the BBC wanted they could certainly sway the viewing audience.
Back in 1977, when Red Rum won the last of his three Grand Nationals, they brought the great horse into the studios but, being practical, it will never happen again. They are, after all, cutting back on their horse racing coverage dramatically and it is no secret that those in power at the BBC would do away with it altogether given the chance.
In fairytale circumstances, back in 1981, Bob Champion overcame cancer to win the Grand National on Aldaniti who was himself returning from life-threatening injury.
A film was subsequently made about the story but the fact is this partnership was not put forward as a potential SPoY winner.
We have to be practical, horseracing is not a mainstream sport and looking through a list of previous winners it is clear that — Olympic gold medal winners in any sport apart — you have the best chance of winning the award if you are an athlete, a Formula 1 driver, or a boxer.
F1 drivers have actually filled the runner-up spots in each of the last three years — world champion Jenson Button last year, Lewis Hamilton in 2008 (his Championship winning year) and 2007. But neither Englishman have excelled during 2010.
Boxer David Haye defended his WBA Heavyweight Championship no less than three times in 2010. He also looks a penalty kick to do so again against Audley Harrison in Manchester on November 13. However his fights have not been broadcast on terrestrial television and, vitally, that includes the BBC.
Similarly he is nowhere near as popular as the likes of Frank Bruno who, amazingly, never landed the SPoY. I’d love to say fill your boots with the 66/1 on offer about him but I cannot.
It is easy to put a line through snooker too. The game has had a torrid year in the press amid match fixing allegations.
Regardless, snooker may enjoy considerably more live coverage on the BBC than horse racing but Steve Davis was the last snooker playing winner of the Award back in 1988 while no snooker player has finished in a top three position since Stephen Hendry in 1990.
As for football, the World Cup was a washout and, based purely on his achievements during the preceding twelve months, there was no good reason for Ryan Giggs to have won last year’s Award.
It was purely down to the hundreds of thousands of Manchester United faithful giving their stalwart a thank you gift of a telephone vote in return for his loyalty to the club down the years.
So, this year, if someone is going to stand in McCoy’s way it is going to be a golfer or, even more likely, an athlete.
Amongst the 142 medals won at the Commonwealth Games, 37 of which were gold, not one belonged to heptathlete Jessica Ennis. However, the 24-year-old pin-up girl was just 9/2 to win SPoY last year (ultimately finishing third) on the back of her heptathlon gold medal in the 2009 World Championships.
This year she has won the European Championships, winning all seven disciplines that make up the heptathlon in a Championship record score, and repeated the dose in the World Indoor Championships (which does not feature a javelin or 200 metres and is called a pentathlon for those that want to nitpick).
With BBC Sports long-term emphasis on the 2012 London Olympics, athletics will doubtlessly receive massive coverage in their SPoY show — as the great hope for gold there — and therein I am taking all the 14/1 currently available about her receiving the accolade.
But the biggest bet of all is reserved for the opposition of Tony McCoy who will also need to see off the Ryder Cup golfers headed by US Open winner Graeme McDowell (currently the second favourite in the SPoY betting) and Lee Westwood who has just reached world No. 1 status.
Mentions must also go perennial darts world champion Phil Taylor, who would be as worthy a winner as Tony McCoy being an equal master of his field, but he cannot win being a face which only features on the SKY Sports.
Tom Daley, a 10-metre platform diver who netted gold in the Commonwealth Games, is surprisingly short in the betting (at 20s). Granted his school-boy status and cute smile will attain some votes, but you would have to very much doubt a competitor from such an obscure sport could attain enough public support to prevail.
Then again the queen’s granddaughter, gymkhana rider Zara Phillips, won the Award in 2006 and that remains one of the biggest mysteries of all time, fitting of a scene from the X Files.
The final obstacle Tony McCoy will have to overcome is an organisation called Racing for Change who are charged with the task of promoting horse racing but to date their publicity drives have been as successful as the good work achieved by BPs PR department.
So far they have come up with fantastic initiatives like doing away with traditional betting odds such as 5/4 and 100/30 and replacing them with figures: 2.25 and 4.33 for example. Such odds are the very fabric of racing, they are what makes it unique and gives it its character. The experiment was a disaster.
Their other big breakthrough was the broadcasting of a stewards enquiry from Glorious Goodwood. It was another farce.
We wanted and were expecting an insight into the discussions and decision making process between those stewards. Instead we got something akin to the opening arguments from the 80s series Crown Court which was followed by a verdict delivered over the tracks PA system.
Somewhere along the line you sense this PR machine will make a faux pas or simply over expose their man leading to a protest vote against him as was the case with 2009 X Factor winner Joe McElderry, who had the Christmas No. 1 race seemingly all wrapped up until a campaign to expose the achievement as a farce, successfully made a 17-year-old Rage Against The Machine tune the biggest selling track of the festive period.
Conclusion
Just who is going to lift this trophy ahead of Tony McCoy remains to be seen but I suspect someone will and, with her looks, two major titles in 2010, the BBCs love of athletics and the BBC televised 2012 Olympics on the horizon, I suspect it will be Jessica Ennis.
Favorites have had a bad record in recent years and McCoy, who did finish third in the 2002 rendition of Sports Personality of the Year Award, is likely to keep that trend going. Consequently lay him at all and any odds under 6/4. ♠