The BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award is the titular award of the BBC Sports Personality of the Year ceremony, which takes place each December. The winner is the sportsperson, judged by a public vote, to have achieved the most that year. The recipient must either be British or reside and play a significant amount of their sport in the United Kingdom. The winner is selected by a public-vote from a pre-determinted shortlist.
Sports Personality of the Year was created by Paul Fox, who thought of the idea while he was editor of the magazine show Sportsview. The first award ceremony took place in 1954 as part of Sportsview, and was presented by Peter Dimmock. For the first show, voting were sent by postcard, and rules presented in a Radio Times article stipulated that nominations were restricted to athletes who had featured on the Sportsview programme since April. Approximately 14,500 votes were cast, and Christopher Chataway beat Roger Bannister to win the inaugural BBC Sportsperson of the Year Award. Since then, numerous other awards have been introduced to the ceremony, which now consists of eight awards. Three people have won the award multiple times: boxer Henry Cooper and the Formula One drivers Nigel Mansell and Damon Hill have each won twice. Snooker player Steve Davis has finished in the top three a record five times. HRH The Princess Anne (1971) and her daughter Zara Phillips (2006) are the only pair of award-winners to be members of the same family. The oldest recipient of the award is Dai Rees, who won in 1957 aged 44. Ian Black, who won the following year, aged 17, is the youngest winner. Out of the fifty-seven recipients, thirteen have been female. Sixteen sporting disciplines have been represented; athletics has the highest representation, with seventeen recipients.
Torvill and Dean, who won in 1984, are the only non-individual winners of the award. Counting them separately, there have been forty-five English winners of the award, four Scottish, four Welsh, three Irish, and one Manx. The most recent award was made in 2012 to cyclist Bradley Wiggins.
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