Stuart Bathgate: Award for Ryan Giggs begs question of how F1 lost its winning formula

Published on Monday 14 December 2009 22:02

TIME was when you could be voted BBC Sports Personality of the Year just for losing the Formula One world championship. Now even winning motorsport's premier title is not enough to guarantee you the TV award.

When Ryan Giggs upset the odds on Sunday night to become the 2009 Sports Personality on Sunday night, it was not only the first time that the award had gone out of England for three years in a row, it was also the third time running that a racing driver had come second after being favoured to win. Bookies' tip Jenson Button was runner-up this year, as Lewis Hamilton had been in 2008 and in 2007.

When Hamilton was pipped by Joe Calzaghe two years ago, there was an apparently straightforward explanation: the driver had failed to win a world championship which had seemed in his grasp, whereas the boxer had pulled off a stunning victory on the eve of the TV programme. In 2008 and again this year, however, the contender from F1 was the world champion, yet on both occasions lost out by a large margin, with Chris Hoy being the winner 12 months ago.

This trend suggests that F1 – long perceived as a core BBC sport despite its fleeting defection to ITV – has lost a significant proportion of its appeal.

Events on the track can hardly be to blame, as the world championships of 2007-09 have been far less predictable than in many previous years, and as a result more attractive to a wider audience. Nor, surely, can the contenders. Hamilton and Button may not be the wackiest sportsmen on the planet, but nor is Giggs. And when compared to previous winners such as Nigel Mansell – the man acclaimed as the first Sports Personality of the Year to be devoid of a personality – the two young drivers positively epitomise ebullience.

As for the relative magnitude of the winners' achievements, that is at best arguable. Hoy's extraordinary achievement in winning three gold medals at one Olympic Games was a greater feat – and certainly a rarer one – than Hamilton's success in claiming the F1 title of 2008. In 2009, however, it is less easy to mount a persuasive case for Giggs having done more than Button.

The Welsh footballer is undeniably one of the outstanding players of his generation, but his most remarkable quality is his longevity at the top. In terms of his achievement as part of the Manchester United team, he perhaps did just as much in 1999, to name but one year, as he did in 2009.

For all that, a coalition of admiration has grown up around him this season – to win the BBC title he had to overcome the tribalism of the football vote. It is this tribalism which explains why footballers have been named Sports Personality only five times since the award began in 1954, with Giggs the first footballer to have won without playing a role in an England World Cup campaign.

In contrast to the World Cup, of course, the F1 championship is an annual event, uniting a significant proportion of the British public behind the UK drivers. Stirling Moss, although never a world champion, was F1's first BBC Sports Personality back in 1961 (John Surtees won in 1959 but was a motorcycle racer at the time). Jackie Stewart was next in 1973, the year of his third world title, but then came the era in which drivers could win the BBC title without taking the world crown. Nigel Mansell did it first, winning in 1986, the year a tyre blowout in Australia denied him a first world title. He then won it again in 1992, the year he did win the F1 crown as well. Damon Hill followed the same pattern in 1994 and 1996.

After the failure by Button, 1996 remains the last time a racing driver has won our most prestigious national sporting title. Since then awards for Paula Radcliffe (2002) and Kelly Holmes (2004) have stretched athletics' already considerable lead over other sports.

In total, 17 track-and-field competitors have now been named Sports Personality. There may be an ecological message in there somewhere, or perhaps the BBC audience, for all its past flirtation with F1, just has a more natural, and enduring, affinity with athletics.