Zara Phillips is YOUR Sports Personality of the Year

year, award officially declared joke

either graeme dott, calzaghe or hatton would have been A-OK with me, but Zara fucking Phillips? awful.

david walliams and theo walcott = also quite, quite awful.

what he did has no relation to sport whatsoever. plenty of people have swum the channel, plenty of these for charity. just because he happens to star in a gruesomely unfunny and outdated (yes, already) 'sketch show', does this add extra credence to his achievement? i think not.

lol, cricket.

OTM - his destruction of Jeff Lacy best performance by a British boxer in years. World Champion for almost a decade with a 100% record since turning pro and he loses to some royal bint in a sport no-one watches.

you are all being rather idiotic here! all the criticisms levelled at phillips and her sport could equally be directed at any of the other candidates named in this thread, really, this is entirely kneejerk "all posh people must die!" reactionary nonsense. her claim to winning was equally as strong as tweddle's or calzaghe's, probably better than clarke's (bear in mind that of those sports i have a mild-to-good interest in golf and gymnastics, and none in boxing or equestrianism).

firstly the fucking nepotism; she was born into showjumping

yes the abominable notion of sporting dynasties is entirely new to her case

secondly the sport itself isn't liked or supported by anybody with an extant pulse

it's better than bloody football

she won a world championship, HOW FUCKING HARD MUST THAT BE

isn't this, like, the pinnacle of her sport outside the olympics?

Darren Clarke was robbed

pinnacle of golf = majors. in comparison to majors, davis cup in tennis and ryder cup in golf = so much hot air. well done darren and i'm sorry your wife is dead but...no. not robbed.

No, I wasn't joking. If it had been a straight public vote he would have walked it.

in which case i'm bloody glad it's not a public vote!

OTM - his destruction of Jeff Lacy best performance by a British boxer in years. World Champion for almost a decade with a 100% record since turning pro and he loses to some royal bint in a sport no-one watches.

like boxing (or indeed gymnastics or golf!) is any less of a niche sport! except its niche is for a working class audience so you MEN OF THE PEOPLE feel ok about getting behind it.

if anyone was robbed it was nicole cooke, actually. world no 1, women's world champion, winner of the women's equivalent of the tour de france etc.

at least roger federer got his due! apparently in america sports illustrated named some basketball dude as sportsman of the year over him :o

At least she thought everything was "amazing". Which is nice.

For the record I hate boxing. It's as tedious to watch as motor racing or golf.

Can we have some respect for the horse?

http://images.google.com/images?q=tbn:wAejtrJuh51VQM:http://www.blenheim-horse.co.uk/content/news/05_event_photos/ppages/zara_fri_04.jpg

Any sport is a niche sport. Boxing is a massive sport. I'm not getting behind boxing as a MAN OF THE PEOPLE but as a casual boxing fan who thinks Joe Calzaghe's achievements in the sport are phenomenal.

When was the last time there was a pay-per-view showjumping competition? No-one except horsey people gives a flying fuck about showjumping and Philips getting the publicity she did is only down to the media being stuck up royal arses.

(I can't believe I'm arguing about a personality competition that has been won by "personalities" such as Nigel Mansell)

Sports and Personality does not always go hand in.

John Curry was a phenomenon in ice skating, and performed with plenty pers, but I don't remember him ever giving interviews.

Steve Ovett was supposedly the bad boy, but he now seems like the good guy as opposed to SebCoe jumping into pol.

"How Flair is Punished" should be the title of this thread.

Anyway, comparing achievements across different sports with vastly different competitive setups, different constituencies/grassroots access/skill-sets is never going to lead to much of a consensus as to what constitutes the finest British performance of the year, so best to give it to the lass 11th in line to the throne, SEZ I.

i'm more annoyed by Walcott winning YSP. clutching at straws.

http://i10.tinypic.com/2gw6ywz.jpg

But this is the thing, it's Sports Personality of The Year. It's a combination of a) achievement and b) ability to capture some sort of public heart during the previous 12 months. We take, say, a hypothetical fight between Calzaghe and Bernard Hopkins. Then we take Zara Philips versus (insert famous three day eventer or whatever this sport is) and Nicole Cooke going on on one with Oenone Wood or whoever.

Now, we put all three of those on Pay Per View. Clue: one of them will do roughly 200 times more business than the other two. This ain't about "niche" sports. Phillips has been on top of her sport for six months, Cooke for three years, Calzaghe for nine. If Calzaghe had been English and not two types of foreigner, maybe he would have won.

Call the cops! David Walliams has been robbed!

Phil is a family man and has four children - Lisa, Chris, Kelly and Natalie - to wife Yvonne. His popularity among darts fans has led to increasing business opportunities - such as writing his autobiography (with Sky TV darts commentator Sid Waddell), and appearances on TV such as "The Frank Skinner Show" where he dressed up in drag and sung alongside former Hear'Say singer Myleene Klass, and "Heads Up with Richard Herring" where he discussed his love of poker. Taylor also appeared on BBC's spelling competition, Hard Spell and has participated in televised celebrity poker.

In 2004, he recorded a song with Sharon Kelly, "Better Than the Best," which was written in his honor and featured a "rap" by Taylor. However, the song was never officially released. He also appeared in British Whale's video for "This Town Ain't Big Enough For Both Of Us" in 2005, which featured a mock darts game against Justin Hawkins of The Darkness.

The one blemish on Taylor's career is an incident after a 1999 exhibition match in Scotland. Two young women, aged 23 and 25, accompanied Taylor back to his motorhome after the competition and later accused him of sexual assault. Taylor denied the charges but he was found guilty of a minor offense and fined £2000. As a result, an anticipated award of the MBE was never offered. [4]

He is also a huge fan of the football club Port Vale.

american tennis fans are currently wringing their hands over the fact that all present and future slam threats are foreign. it's perceived - not least by us tv networks - that foreign players can't sell the sport, that the casual american sports fan won't be interested in them; thus, their coverage of tennis tournaments revolves almost exclusively around andy roddick, the williams sisters when they bother to show up, andy roddick reruns, and andy roddick reruns. and you have to think: OF COURSE american fans won't turn in for foreign elite players because they don't know who they are BECAUSE THE TV NETWORKS REFUSE TO SHOW THEM OUT OF COWARDICE.

so - sure, calzaghe might pull in more viewers than cooke or phillips, but how will cooke's or phillips' sport ever have a hope of reaching the popularity of calzaghe's if every publicity-related decision is made on that basis? the reason that 'no one cares' is because no one KNOWS about them, and this is the fault of a relentlessly 2/3-note sports media in this country which vastly underestimates people's capacity to take an interest in people excelling in sporting fields other than the big three. this largely meaningless award is as good a place as any to raise awareness of equestrianism or women's cycling.

"capturing the heart" also a false trail as if anyone did, it was phillips (yes because of who she is but as has just been outlined the arbitrary nature of "who gets publicity" is hardly one which is much influenced by the concept of "who deserves publicity").

(nb: i don't believe boxing is a particularly 'massive' sport anyway; it's less obscure than women's cycling or equestrianism, but not to the extent that it can really brag about how many more people care about it. it's hardly football. it's not even tennis or golf.)

(nnbb: botherd about nine-year accomplishments, this is the sports personality OF THE YEAR award, ie THIS YEAR)

No, she's a cyclist.

something to do with the thrill of two topless men grappling with each other and sweating profusely. i can't see the appeal myself.

As I said earlier
his destruction of Jeff Lacy best performance by a British boxer in years

That fight was this year, and is possibly one of the greatest displays of boxing skill I've ever seen - and represents IMO the pinnacle of Calzaghe's career. If he was ever to win this award then this year was his best shot (given that next year he's chasing the dollar by fighting a reality TV show winner - not Matt from Busted, sadly).

Totally OTM. I do wish it wasn't called Sports personality of the Year, though, just to avoid my father's inevitable remarks about the winner's lack thereof, which I've had to suffer since Nigel Mansell won it.

Zara's winning speech was even worse than Michael Owen's!

:-P

http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=1814172006

those elephant polo guys win every year, it's scotland's 'banker', isn't it?

Also his suit was horrendous. Really really awful. Did he not have a mirror in his dressing room?

Graeme Dott will not win Scottish Sports Personality of the year. Snooker players get a really bad rap at this sort of thing unless they are completely dominant in their sport. I don't think Dott's achieved that much - he's won ONE tournament in his life, OK it was the World Championship, but it's still just one tournament. I also kind of think Steven Pressley is going to be in with a shout this year for standing up to Mad Vlad and his resultant ascension into working-class-revolutionary-hero, though I fully expect it'll be Andy Murray.

hmm i'm not entirely au fait with how the ryder cup is perceived in golf but i'm using davis cup/fed cup/olympics as a parallel in tennis, where success in those events is generally seen in a cherry-on-top sense, an impressive achievement but not quite the level of winning a major. partly this is the team factor - tennis and golf are fundamentally individual sports, to crowbar a team aspect on to them seems rather contrived. plus of course there's the shared glory thing - there are players who have 'won' the davis cup without even bring called on to play a match.

there's no question that for some players, winning for one's country is dearer to their hearts - elena dementieva has said that her olympic silver medal will always be her proudest accomplishment in the sport, even if she were to win a slam in the future - but others couldn't be less bothered (pete sampras and martina hingis spring to mind). everyone agrees on the importance of the majors though.

http://www.sundaymail.co.uk/sport/football/tm_headline=pressley-axed-by-jambos%26method=full%26objectid=18239835%26siteid=64736-name_page.html

Funny how the two younger, more talented guys whose value to Hearts is greater in terms of future transfer fees who stood alongside him when he started his revolution didn't get booted out as well...

Supporters of other teams find it all tremendously funny though, as evidenced by the roffles all over the Scottish football thread. Though there's a large "there but for the grace of God..." element about the roffling.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2346/2120372677_4482a7a55e.jpg

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1380/755714919_2398b56ec5_m.jpg
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