Dani Garavelli: BBC’s unsporting conduct

WHILE half the world was working itself into a lather over Jeremy Clarkson’s incisive contribution to the debate on last week’s strike – and the other half was wondering what all the fuss was about – the BBC was embroiled in another, altogether more significant controversy, the Sports Personality of the Year debacle.

No sooner had this year’s ten-strong shortlist been unveiled, than right-on party poopers like me were pointing out a glaring omission. There wasn’t a single woman on it. Now I’m not one for tokenism but I think that, in a year which saw Keri-Anne Payne win the 10km swim at the World Aquatic Championships and Sarah Stevenson take gold at the World Taekwondo Championships, a couple of women might have snuck in on merit, particularly since several of those who did make the list – including our own Andy Murray – had not won anything significant.

So oblivious were the organisers to the offensiveness of the failure to recognise the contribution made by female athletes, they invited some of those who didn’t make the cut to the awards ceremony so they could cheer the blokes on. One, Chrissie Wellington, who claimed her fourth world Ironman crown in the space of five years last month, is so angry she is boycotting the event and calling on other women to do the same. Good on her, I say. The only problem is most members of the male-dominated audience won’t notice. And even if they do, they’ll only use it as an excuse to crack jokes about no-one getting their “Nat King Cole” at the after-show party.

The problem, according to the BBC, lies with the nomination process. After years of relying on public opinion, the system was changed in 2005 because it was believed the highly vocal fans of particular sports were skewing the results.

Instead it sought the opinions of 27 national and regional publications. Perhaps when it included Zoo and Nuts – magazines whose idea of a female sporting champion is a woman who can balance a ball on each of her enormous breasts – and not the likes of magazine Sportsister, it should have foreseen the new system would skew the results in a different way. But it was apparently unaware of the testosterone-fuelled atmosphere of most newspaper sports departments, until ten of the 27 lists came back bereft of women.

Besieged by complaints, the BBC has promised to review the selection procedure. But whether a list drawn up by the general public would be much more inclusive is a moot point; there have, after all, been only 13 female winners in the award’s 56-year history and two of them – Princess Anne and Zara Phillips – were members of the Royal Family.

Part of the problem lies with the title, Sports PERSONALITY of the year, which implies a degree of celebrity. It’s true that many successful sportswomen are not so often personalities in that sense, largely because they are ignored by the media unless they are a) stunningly good-looking, or b) sleeping with a famous male sportsman. Many people may be unaware of Chrissie Wellington’s achievements because they don’t attract the same coverage as, say, Lewis Hamilton winning the Grand Prix. The problem is deep-rooted and self-perpetuating; fewer women are interested in reading about sport, it’s said.

But how many women want to engage in a world which, with its male rituals and dismissive attitude, actively seeks to exclude them at every level from the field to the boardroom?

My only personal experience is with football. Earlier this year I had the misfortune to attend a fundraising event for a youth academy. The atmosphere was ugly. The speeches were peppered with the C-word, crude jibes – many of them aimed at the waitresses – and jokes which would have stuck out as misogynistic in a working man’s club in the 1970s. I would rather attend the AGM of the National Philatelic Society than repeat the experience.

That’s no great loss to me (or them), but what about women with a genuine passion for sport, particularly those who want to participate. They face discrimination and a shocking lack of investment. According to the Commission on the Future of Women’s Sport, in 2009 only one in five members of the boards of national governing bodies were women, and one quarter of sports had no female board members at all. No wonder sportswomen are still treated as second-class citizens.

Things are slowly improving. Some funding has been forthcoming for grassroots initiatives to encourage girls to take up sports, while the commission is liaising with sports sponsorship experts to work out how women’s sports can attract more money.

But Harriet Harman is right when she says the BBC Sports Personality of the Year shortlist is undermining that work. After all, seeing women such as Wellington have their contribution to sport ignored in this inherently sexist manner is hardly going to inspire eager young athletes on to greater things.