BBC Sports Personality of the Year 2023 – live
The Sports Personality of the Year Awards are upon us again. For some, they are a warm festive televisual comfort blanket, while others see them as an increasingly anachronistic exercise in box-ticking. Whatever your view, this annual orgy of often self-congratulatory backslapping is now celebrating its platinum jubilee and will tonight be hosted by BBC royalty in the form of Gary Lineker, Alex Scott, Gabby Logan and Clare Balding.
Tonight’s ceremony comes from Media City in Salford, where the good and the great of domestic and international sport will assemble, while the majority of the audience, the viewing public, will tune in from their living rooms.
An always amusing annual exercise in the generation of often inexplicable white-hot fury on the part of viewers who apparently remain oblivious to the fact it is neither compulsory viewing nor very important in the cosmic or even sporting scheme of things, Spoty remains many things to many people, all of whom are very welcome to our live coverage this evening.
In the 12 months of sporting endeavour just passed, we have seen England’s Lionesses make it to the Women’s World Cup final, Europe’s golfers winning the Ryder Cup and England being robbed (yes, robbed!) of outright victory in the Ashes through a heady mix of what can only be described as unfair dinkum on the part of both their Australian opponents and the weather.
Elsewhere, assorted representatives of Team GB enjoyed success at the World Athletics Championships, UCI Cycling World Championships, while England’s rugby players earned themselves a tip of the hat for defying the expectations of many by reaching the semi-finals of the Rugby World Cup.
In football, Manchester City hogged the limelight by securing the treble, while we can also expect to see more sedate but no less entertaining disciplines such as snooker, darts and bowls enjoy their fleeting 10 seconds of annual Spoty fame in tonight’s obligatory montages devoted to Sports We Are Obliged To Mention But Don’t Really Have Time To Dwell On This Year. For one reason or another, we can expect to see Wimbledon, the Tour de France, Formula One, the Grand National, the Open, the Derby, the Boat Race and assorted Lycra-clad athletes you’ve never heard of gadding about on ice or parallel bars get perfunctory mentions, along with whatever sport you’re really into that we’ve accidentally overlooked here.
Tonight’s Sports Personality of the Year awards shindig is scheduled to last two hours but will almost certainly feel a lot longer and will see eight different gongs handed out, culminating in the presentation of the Big One to an athlete whose ownership of a “personality” worthy of the award will subsequently be debated at great and tedious length on Twitter/X.
In a ceremony boasting more gear changes from Lineker and his co-hosts than Lewis Hamilton negotiating a hairpin bend there’ll be fun bits, sad bits, jingoistic bits, poignant bits, some music and almost certainly a wacky turn from somebody that may or may not be a famous YouTuber or James Cordon.
Whatever this evening’s soiree throws at us, we’ll have you covered and as is customary come evening’s end, we’ll still be no closer to reaching a satisfactory conclusion to the interminable debate over whether or not darts has earned the right to call itself a sport.