By the Times Simon Barnes
So which loser shall we give it to this year? Lewis Hamilton, who lost the Formula One drivers’ World Championship, is favourite to win the BBC Sports Personality of the Year; he’s 5-2 on. It’s a done deal.
There is a great tradition of Formula One losers being made Sports Personality of the Year; Nigel Mansell in 1986, Damon Hill in 1994. Silver medal is the prize for the first loser: that, and the BBC Sports Personality award.
It’s not only drivers. There is a national habit of giving the award to people who haven’t won anything and that is, at least on the face of it, an odd thing in a business that is supposed to be about winning and nothing else. On five occasions since 1990 the award has gone to a nonwinner. That is to say, a loser. In 1990 it went to Paul Gascoigne, for losing to West Germany in the semi-finals of the World Cup. England finished fourth in that tournament after losing the third-place play-off. Gascoigne cried and didn’t even take a penalty in the shoot-out (he had been substituted).
In 1994 Hill got the award for not being Formula One world champion. It was the year he was driven off the track by Michael Schumacher; it was a sort of consolation prize from a sympathetic nation.
In 1997 Greg Rusedski got the award for being the losing finalist in the US Open tennis tournament. He lost to Pat Rafter, of Australia, in four sets; perhaps the fact that he won a set and was wearing a black armband for Diana, Princess of Wales, swayed everybody’s judgment.
The next year the award went to Michael Owen. The striker scored a great goal for England against Argentina, but England lost the match on penalties and so they went out of the competition in the round of 16. Is that as far from being a winner as an award-winner can get?
No, actually. In 2001 David Beckham won it. He got the award after England qualified for the World Cup finals in melodramatic fashion, almost losing to Greece in the last match in the qualifying group before Beckham’s swirling 93rd minute free kick made it 2-2. So England didn’t even win the match and, rather than actually wining something, England simply counted themselves among the 32 nations who would take part in the tournament. Not exactly world-beating stuff.
Now there are a number of ways of looking at this, but the first thing to be clear about is that we are by no means bigoted in our national taste for winners. (The past five recipients of the award have been serious winners: Paula Radcliffe, Jonny Wilkinson, Kelly Holmes, Andrew Flintoff and Zara Phillips).
But we are not pedantic about sporting heroes. We prefer winners, but we are happy to embrace the right kind of loser. In other words, losing also has a kind of beauty.
There is perfection and a beauty about defeat, but above all there is sometimes a story, a vivid tale of a cosmic striving and a desperate falling-short. Sport doesn’t only give you impregnable and immaculate heroes, it also gives you flawed heroes and flawed losers that excite our love. The nation judges and tomorrow night a loser will win.
Me? I’d vote for Christine Ohuruogu, but there you go.
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