BBC Sports Personality of The Year - History

History

The BBC's Sports Personality of the Year was created by Paul Fox, who came up with 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. Held at the Savoy Hotel on 30 December 1954, the show lasted 45 minutes. It consisted of one titular award for the sportsperson judged by the public to have achieved the most that year. Voting was 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. For the inaugural BBC Sportsperson of the Year award, 14,517 votes were cast and Christopher Chataway beat fellow athlete Roger Bannister. The following year the show was renamed Sports Review of the Year and given a longer duration of 75 minutes.

In 1960 Dimmock presented the show, and introduced two new awards: the Team of the Year award and the Overseas Personality award, won by the Cooper Car Company and athlete Herb Elliott respectively. David Coleman joined the show the following year and remained a co-presenter until 1983. Swimmer Anita Lonsbrough became the first female recipient of the main award in 1962; females won it in the following two years as well. Frank Bough took over as presenter in 1964 and presented Sports Review for 18 years. In 1969, a new Manager of the Year award was given to Don Revie for his achievements with Leeds United, the only occasion it was presented. In the following year boxer Henry Cooper became the first person to win the main award twice, having already won in 1967.

During the 1970s Bough and Coleman presided over the ceremony alongside Jimmy Hill, Cliff Morgan, Kenneth Wolstenholme, and Harry Carpenter, who also went on to present the show for much of the 1980s. Des Lynam presented from 1983, and presided over figure skating duo Torvill and Dean's win the following year, when they became the first non-individual winners of the main award. Steve Rider co-presented the 1986 show with Lynam, at which a Special Team Award was presented to Great Britain men's 4 x 400 m relay team. In the 1980s, Steve Davis finished in the top three on five occasions, including one win in 1988. In 1991, angler Bob Nudd received the most votes following a campaign in the Angling Times. However the BBC deemed this to be against the rules and "discarded all the ballots cast on forms printed in the Angling Times", allowing athlete Liz McColgan to win the award. The following year racing driver Nigel Mansell became the second person to win the main award twice, having won his first in 1986. Sue Barker presented the show for the first time in 1994, at which racing driver Damon Hill won the first of his two awards, the second coming two years later. Boxer Frank Bruno was the inaugural winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996, and as of 2008 there have been ten recipients of the award.

In 1999 the show was renamed Sports Personality of the Year, and Gary Lineker joined the show as a co-presenter alongside Barker. Barker and Lineker were supported by John Inverdale and Clare Balding that year. The ceremony introduced a further three regular awards: Coach of the Year, Newcomer of the Year, and a Helen Rollason Award for "outstanding courage and achievement in the face of adversity". In a one-off award, boxer Muhammad Ali was voted as the Sports Personality of the Century. On 1 November 2003, BBC Books published "BBC Sports Personality of the Year 50th Anniversary" (ISBN 0-563-48747-X), written by Steve Rider and Martyn Smith, to mark the golden anniversary of the show. Leading up to the anniversary show on 14 December 2003, a series of five half-hour special programmes, entitled Simply The Best – Sports Personality, were broadcast. Hosted by Gary Lineker, the episodes were shown on BBC One for five consecutive nights during 8–12 December 2008; each covered one decade of Sports Personality history. At the beginning of each special programme the public could vote for a past winner. The five most popular winners were announced at the start of the anniversary ceremony as a shortlist for one of two special 50th Anniversary awards. From the shortlist, rower Steve Redgrave was voted Golden Sports Personality of the Year by the public. The England World Cup–winning team of 1966 won a Team of the Decades award, voted for by representatives from all previous Teams of the Year.

In 2006, for the first time in its 53-year history, the event was held outside London, in Birmingham's National Exhibition Centre (NEC). For the first time, tickets for the event were made available to the public, and 3,000 were sold in the first hour. That year, Adrian Chiles joined the show and co-presented alongside Barker and Lineker for two years. The 2007 ceremony was the first of a two-year sponsorship deal with Britvic's brand Robinsons, and the capacity of the NEC was increased from 5,000 to 8,000. The event sold out, but the sponsorship deal was shortened to one year after complaints by ITV and RadioCentre caused the BBC Trust to rule in June 2008 that "Editorial Guidelines were breached and the editorial integrity of the BBC compromised by giving the impression to licence fee payers via Sports Personality of the Year that part of a BBC service had been sponsored." They decided that the 2008 awards should not be broadcast as a sponsored event, and no new sponsorship deal was negotiated after the Britvic deal expired. In February 2008, the BBC announced that the 2008 Sports Personality of the Year event would be held at the Echo Arena, Liverpool. One reason for the move to Liverpool was to allow greater numbers to view the show live, as the 10,600-seater venue in Liverpool had a bigger capacity than the NEC. That year Jake Humphrey replaced Chiles as co-presenter. The 2009 show was rumoured to be held in either Cardiff or Glasgow. However, it was announced on 30 April 2009 that the show would be staged at the Sheffield Arena. In May 2010, it was announced that the 2010 ceremony would be held in Birmingham's LG Arena and will seat approximately 12,000 guests.