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.
Read more about BBC Sports Personality Of The Year Award: Nomination Procedure, Winners, See Also
Famous quotes containing the words bbc, sports, personality, year and/or award:
“To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer.”
—Anonymous. quoted in “Quote Unquote,” Feb. 22, 1982, BBC Radio 4.
“Falling in love is the right adventure for those who dislike sports and travel.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“The great pines stand at a considerable distance from each other. Each tree grows alone, murmurs alone, thinks alone. They do not intrude upon each other. The Navajos are not much in the habit of giving or of asking help. Their language is not a communicative one, and they never attempt an interchange of personality in speech. Over their forests there is the same inexorable reserve. Each tree has its exalted power to bear.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“It’s given new meaning to me of the scientific term black hole.”
—Don Logan, U.S. businessman, president and chief executive of Time Inc. His response when asked how much his company had spent in the last year to develop Pathfinder, Time Inc.’S site on the World Wide Web. Quoted in New York Times, p. D7 (November 13, 1995)
“The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.”
—Robert Graves (1895–1985)