Sports Personality : Oxymoron

I didn’t watch the absurd ‘Sports Personality of the Year’ award, but I heard that Ryan Giggs won it. Baffling. What did he win it for, exactly?

Not his personality, surely. Sports personality seems like an oxymoron to me. Giggs seems like a fairly nice bloke, without the arrogance of many footballers, but how this sets him apart from all other sportsmen and women I don’t know.

What’s the award for, exactly? It’s obviously not for ‘personality’. Is it for achievement? Improvement? Consistency? Comebacks? A combination of all the above? If so a far more worthy winner would have been Beth Tweddle, the gymnast; or maybe Jenson Button; or David Haye. World champions all. The award is basically a popularity contest. Giggs isn’t even the best footballer in the UK at the moment. He could win an award for longevity and consistency, but the ‘BBC Consistency and Longevity in Sport Award’ doesn’t have the same ring about it.

It does reveal the stranglehold that football has on sport in this country though. And that sport is now more about ‘personalities’ (whatever that means, exactly) than sporting prowess.

Sporting prowess in itself is completely overrated. So what if someone can swing a golf club better than me, or bounce a ball into a hoop more accurately? So what? Sports are arbitrary. There are many sports that don’t make it into the Olympics, that don’t have professional leagues, and yet are no less ‘sports’ in their own right. They roll a large cheese down a hill in the West Country somewhere, and when I was at school we played ‘penny up the wall’. I bet there are urchins in north London and West Country bumpbkins who perform these sports better than Tiger Woods or Ryan Giggs ever would. So what is there to admire about Ryan Giggs, exactly? Just a few hundred years ago football was basically a cheese-rolling contest between mobs of howling villagers. No different. It just got lucky. Why is curling an Olympic sport but cheese-rolling not?

We can admire sporting prowess only as escapism. Forget what really matters in life and admire the dribbling skills Ryan Giggs or the boxing artistry of Floyd Mayweather Jr. Yes, I agree that it is aesthetically pleasing to many and we can admire the skill, technique and dedication it requires. I like watching a great footballer or a boxer in full flow. I’m looking forward to Pacquiao vs Mayweather, and the World Cup next year. But…. if you remember that someone just made up these sports when they were bored, and then made up the rules of these sports off the top of their heads then it becomes a little less impressive.

In the last 30 years sportsmen have become transmogrified into commercial entities and ‘role models’. It inevitably ends in disappointment for all. Sponsors have cottoned on to the relentless human need to be entertained and diverted. The Romans understood this, providing ‘panem et circenses’ for the masses. .Even politicians get in on the act. The public play along and live their lives vicariously through their teams or players, getting swept up in the hysteria and often defining and dividing themselves into tribes based on loyalties to ‘their’ teams.

The BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award is an absurdity that attempts to elevate what is objectively ridiculous to an artificial and arbitrary position of value. When I have watched these awards in the past it’s always struck me how the sportsmen all look faintly embarrassed as they sit there being told how good they are at swimming up and down or running round in circles or whatever. They know that although it might be important to them, for everyone else watching their endeavours are just escapism.