Sidepodcast

In 2007, it was so obvious that Lewis Hamilton was going to win the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award. No one had seen such a stunning start to a sporting career, and he had reinvigorated plenty of Briton’s interest in motor racing.

Then Joe Calzaghe started punching his way into the public’s hearts, and everyone forgot about their F1 hero. He finished up second, but who ever remembers second place in this kind of competition?

The question is, can Hamilton make it this year? He’s well on his way to a maiden championship title, with only one real rival for it. He’s been winning all over the place, featured in all the newspapers, handing out some awards, and generally increasing his popularity.

Granted Lewis also left the country and bemoaned being famous, but that doesn’t seem to have damaged his status too much.

The problem with this year is a small little thing called the Olympics. Our athletes won our highest medal tally for over 100 years, and we brought home plenty of lovely gold.

With the Games fresh in our minds, and lingering due to our hosting duties in 2012, it’s highly likely that Mr Hamilton will be usurped again. I’m not a betting expert, and the bracketed odds are bound to change, but the BBC list swimming champ Rebecca Adlington (2-1), cyclist Chris Hoy (5-2) and sailor Ben Ainslie (20-1) amongst those in with a chance. Hamilton (5-2) is right up there with the best of them.

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There’s plenty of talk going round at the moment about the possibility of a London Grand Prix in 2012 to be included in the Olympics. I’ve been watching some of the Olympic coverage, alright, a lot of it, and there are a few incidents I’ve seen that show good reason for this not to happen.

Running For No Reason

In the gymnastics hall, a Russian girl was taking part in the vault. She ran up, did her stuff and executed a perfect landing. She jogged to her trainer and waited for the result. The wait was interminable, and the judges were clearly arguing about something. In the end, it turns out that she ran when the judges weren’t ready and she was awarded a zero score. When the competition works on an average of your scores, a zero is pretty devastating.

What would happen if this occurred during a race? Perhaps there’d be complaints that a car jumped the start, and Charlie Whiting would have to say - “Sorry guys, I wasn’t looking? Let’s award him no points anyway.”

A Different Kind of Pole Position

In the pole vault competition, a Brazilian entrant had to pass one of her attempts because she couldn’t find her pole. The long bendy sticks are gathered together by officials and kept under lock and key, to be brought out only in time for the competition. Now, all the stories I have read on this fail to tell me what happened in the end, so I’m assuming the pole was found and life carried on normally. I’d imagine there would have been more of a fuss, otherwise.

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