As the BBC’s small, Covid-friendly Sports Personality of the Year award ceremony drew to a predictable conclusion, Lewis Hamilton – appearing via video link from a position in front of a lavishly decorated Christmas tree in Monaco – held up the replica trophy he had been thoughtfully equipped with in case of victory and thanked the people of Britain for voting for him. “All the frontline workers, all the children of the world, please try to stay positive at this difficult time,” he said. “Please, everyone out there, go out and follow your dreams.”
Unless you’re in a tier 4 area, of course, in which case you should very much be looking to stay in and follow your dreams.
It was a second win for Hamilton to go with four second-place finishes, the most recent of which was last year, and the sight of him choosing to dial in from self-imposed tax exile was one of the few things about the ceremony that had not changed over the last 12 months. In the decade and a half since it left BBC Television Centre, where it was traditionally held in front of a small audience of famous faces and invited guests, it had inflated to eventually become the bloated extravaganza that filled Aberdeen’s P&J Live arena in 2019, where the closest things to actual sport were the scrum of red carpet photographers, the microphone jousting engaged in by the BBC’s competing teams of online and terrestrial backstage interviewers, and the long-distance running of anyone who needed to reach the stage in a hurry.
The event has long needed to be downsized a bit, though the BBC refused to let the absence of an arena-sized crowd or, for that matter, many of the greatest sporting events originally scheduled for 2020 – the Olympics, the European Championships, Wimbledon, the Open, the Asian Weightlifting Championships – affect its schedules, still managing to fill two hours of primetime Sunday evening and scaling back nothing but a little bombast.
The programme started with one of two puzzling moments involving Sir Tom Moore, as the centenarian fundraiser extraordinaire suggested that this year “we have come together like never before” – strange, as I mainly remember us being kept apart. Moore has inspired many and been rightly honoured for it, but quite what convinced anyone to add to his haul of gongs the Helen Rollason award “for outstanding achievement in the face of adversity”, given his complete lack of association with elite sport and the rival claim of, for example, the former Leeds Rhinos player Rob Burrow (who got a mention later in the show), is destined to remain a mystery. “I never anticipated I would receive this award,” Moore said, and he wasn’t the only one.
The other unexpected success saw the World Sports Star of the Year trophy ending up with Khabib Nurmagomedov, a UFC fighter whose one outing this year lasted less than two rounds and was followed by his retirement, ahead of rival nominees including LeBron James and golfer Dustin Johnson, and with Naomi Osaka not even worth a place on the shortlist.
To be fair Nurmagomedov has had a sensational career and an unforgettable year for all sorts of reasons – before his fight in October, his last significant mention in the Guardian was in May, when Covid-19 was running wild in his home region of Dagestan, his father and coach, Abdulmanap, had been airlifted to the intensive care ward of a Moscow hospital after falling seriously ill with the disease – he died in July, aged just 57 – and he was beseeching his 26 million Instagram followers to adhere to lockdown measures. For all the airtime they had to fill the BBC didn’t mention any of that, dealing with Nurmagomedov’s victory in about 20 seconds while briefly flashing up a picture of him in a papakha, his trademark traditional Dagestani sheepskin hat.
Other surprises across the evening included a Gary Lineker joke about erectile dysfunction, the existence of a really quite good Rick Astley song, a Clare Balding-Gabby Logan boogie that was only 25 hours too late, and also nowhere near good enough, for the Strictly Come Dancing final, and the use of exactly the same recorded peel of applause for every applause-here moment across the entire two hours.
Though we never got to hear them there was an audience of sorts, comprised of around 700 fans, sportspeople and key workers who like the night’s eventual champion dialled in remotely. They included several former winners of the main award, among them Sir Jackie Stewart, waving cheerfully from a hospital bed – a routine knee operation, apparently. As celebrations of a nation’s fittest and finest go, this one was full of reminders of its current frailty. Hopefully by this time next year we will have returned to full health, and all the arena bookings, bloated guestlists and distant public galleries that come with it.