Murray: star in great year of sport

By  Jim White

This afternoon, before hosting the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year show, Gabby Logan tweeted a picture of the set in Leeds. 

And my, it looked impressive, suggesting that despite all available evidence there was some money left in the BBC’s kitty after sending out half the staff to cover Nelson Mandela’s passing. 

A ravishing swirl of steel and glass, the centrepiece was a scaffolding structure resembling a giant water-wheel. On its shelves sat some of the great trophies of sport. 

The irony is these are trophies whose victory rites are these days largely broadcast elsewhere. It is a paradox of our television times that the less sport the BBC has to show, the more lavish its annual sporting awards ceremony has become. When it was first shown in 1954, when the corporation was the nation’s sole broadcaster, the BBC Sports Review of the Year ran for just 45 minutes, with the revelation of the leading individual tagged on to the end. This year, when everyone from Sky through to Channel 4 to BT has cherry-picked off the BBC’s live portfolio, the 60th anniversary show ran for around three hours. 

It was a ceremony filled with artful short films of the contenders shot in pixelated slo-mo, an event tailored for The X Factor generation, so bedecked in cutesy production flourishes Lady Gaga might consider it a tad over the top. 

But even if the evening rarely passes off without manufactured bombast, ritual sycophancy and self-inflicted embarrassment, there is one thing about the BBC award: it still matters. This is a piece of silverware every British sportsperson wants on their mantelpiece. 

This is, moreover, an award that perfectly reflects the times. The great peaks of British sporting history are writ large in the list of previous winners. Bobby Moore won it in 1966, Ian Botham in 1981, Jonny Wilkinson in 2003 and Sir Bradley Wiggins in 2012. 

But when the sport has been rubbish, when the year is characterised by a plucky Brit trudging home in a brave seventh place, then invariably the Sports Personality suffers. In those times the show is dismissed as an embarrassment, an anachronism, a joke. And the winner is hurriedly forgotten. 

Not this time. In brilliant refutation of the idea that 2012’s Olympic-driven glory could never be matched, this year the gong had been pursued with an almighty scramble of excellence. 

What a year of British effort was reflected in those going for the honours. There was AP McCoy, the jockey with his 4,000 winners; Justin Rose triumphing in the US Open golf; the cyclist Chris Froome picking up Sir Brad’s baton in the Tour; Mo Farah doing a clean sweep at the world athletics championships and Sir Ben Ainslie, the sailor who single-handedly turned around the America’s Cup. 

If any of them had been doing what they did this year in 1997, the winner Greg Rusedski, whose principal claim was losing in the US Open tennis final, would have been lucky to get an invitation. 

Yet they all went home empty-handed this time. There was only ever one candidate for the supreme honour. In the year he became the first Briton in three quarters of a century to win the men’s singles competition at Wimbledon, Andy Murray’s achievement was of such resonance it was always certain to see off even that stellar list of contenders. 

Not that he was there to receive his invitation to the pantheon in person. Murray did not win Wimbledon by curtailing his relentlessly masochistic winter training schedule. Never mind the enormous commercial benefit in turning up in Leeds, he remained in his camp in Florida. 

Across the years when he has been in contention, he has politely declined the invitation to break his training with a transatlantic flight and has stayed in the warmth. 

Last year, things got toe-curlingly awkward when he was obliged to present himself with the runners-up gong after Lennox Lewis, who was supposed to do the honours, missed his cue. 

Murray continues the award’s astonishing pattern. The last six winners have been from, in order, England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Isle of Man and England. This is truly a British competition, a symbol of a united sporting nation. In a great year, Murray is our greatest star. Telegraph