Which Sports Has the Most BBC Sports Personality of the Year Winners?

The contenders for the 2023 BBC Sports Personality of the Year (SPOTY) have been announced and the diverse list features sportspeople from cricket (Stuart Broad), horse racing (Frankie Dettori), football (Mary Earps), golf (Rory McIlroy), athletics (Katarina Johnson-Thompson) and wheelchair tennis (Alfie Hewitt).

We’ve seen SPOTY winners from all those sports before, except wheelchair tennis (though there have been plenty of conventional tennis winners over the years), so it will be interesting to see which hero gets the nod in 2023.

In this article, instead of predicting who will win the 2023 edition, we’ll take a look back at the previous winners and show which sports have landed the prize most often since the first award way back in 1954. There are one or two surprises among the more obvious successes, so let’s get stuck into the stats.

SPOTY Winners by Sport

There have been a total of 17 different sports represented by SPOTY winners over the years (and three of them involve horses!). Eleven sports have provided two or more winners since the inaugural event in 1954 – athletics, F1, tennis, football, cricket, cycling, boxing, figure skating, eventing, golf and swimming.

As well as those sports mentioned above with two or more winners, the following sports have also provided one winner each over the years: snooker, rugby union, rowing, motorcycle racing, show jumping, and horse racing. Now let’s take a closer look at some of the notable winners from the best-represented sports.

Athletics – 18 Winners

The winner of the inaugural Sports Personality of the Award was Christopher Chataway, an athlete who acted as one of the pacemakers for Roger Banister’s sub-four-minute mile. Banister had to settle for second place that year, despite etching himself into athletics folklore, with Chataway’s world record in the 5,000m that year enough to earn him the prize. The British public has long had something of a love affair with athletics, which is exemplified by the sport providing 10 more SPOTY winners than its nearest rival.

Other notable athletes to be awarded SPOTY include the following:

• Mary Rand (1964) – Olympic gold medallist in the long jump at Tokyo 1964. For good measure, she added a silver medal in the pentathlon and a bronze in the 4x100m relay
• Mary Peters (1972) – Peters, from Northern Ireland, won the pentathlon at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, the first British athlete to win an athletics multi-sport event at the Games
• Middle-distance Heroes – Steve Ovett (1978), Sebastian Coe (1979) and Steve Cram (1983) all earned SPOTY awards for their excellence on the track
• Linford Christie (1993) – Christie was the first (and is still the only) British athlete to have won the 100m title at the Olympics, the World Championships, the European Championships and the Commonwealth Games, i.e. the four ‘major’ events (available to Brits)
• Mo Farah (2017) – Mo Farah is the most decorated British athlete of all time in terms of Olympics medals. He won gold in the 5,000m and 10,000m at London 2012 and then repeated the double four years later in Rio de Janeiro. He also won six World Championship golds… and invented the “Mobot”

Formula One – 8 Winners

Although many people find Formula One something of a dull sport, it clearly has plenty of fans as it has provided the SPOTY winner on no fewer than eight occasions. The first victor from the F1 world was the late, great Stirling Moss. Moss never actually won the Formula One title and is often regarded as the best driver never to land the Drivers’ Championship.

The other British F1 drivers to have been crowned SPOTY are Jackie Stewart, Nigel Mansell (twice), Damon Hill (twice) and Lewis Hamilton (twice).

Tennis – 7 Winners

Just as Brits tend to fall in love with very successful athletes, so they appear to fawn over even mildly successful tennis ‘stars’, as typified by Canadian… we mean British tennis ace Greg Rusedski winning the Sports Personality of the Year award in 1997 despite never winning a Grand Slam event and only ever making one final.

On the flip side, the first tennis player to first SPOTY, Ann Jones (in 1969), won a total of eight Grand Slams in her career, three singles and five doubles. Virginia Wade (1977), meanwhile, won three singles Grand Slams, including Wimbledon in 1977, and three while playing doubles. Andy Murray, for all his near misses, also landed three singles Grand Slams… and won as many SPOTY awards for his efforts! Finally, one-hit-wonder Emma Raducanu elevated herself to SPOTY greatness in 2021 by winning the US Open against all the odds. It remains to be seen whether she’ll ever emulate that success.

Football – 6 Winners

Given that football is technically the national sport of the UK and it is enduringly popular, it is perhaps surprising that it is only fourth on our list. To an extent, that can be explained by the fact that many football fans are inherently partisan and an Evertonian is never likely to vote for a Liverpool player, however good their sporting achievements (or personality) have been in the previous year. The other factor is that SPOTY tends to reward sportspeople who have achieved something great on the international stage, and – let’s be honest here – British footballers haven’t done that very often since 1954.

There is one massive exception to that, of course, and it took England’s World Cup triumph in 1966 for football to claim its first SPOTY winner when Three Lions captain Bobby Moore was given that honour. The most recent SPOTY winner from the football world, Beth Mead, helped England win the Women’s Euro 2022 tournament. She won both the Golden Boot awards and the Player of the Tournament and clearly deserved all the plaudits (and the SPOTY award!).

The other four footballers to win SPOTY were Paul Gascoigne (1990), Michael Owen (1998), David Beckham (2001) and Ryan Giggs (2009).

Why Do So Many Athletes Win?

The BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award is something in between a popularity contest and a salute to great sporting achievements. The fact that two members of the royal family have won the award for eventing (prancing on horses … some might say!), which is the same number of winners provided by golf, does make the award’s relevance somewhat questionable for many. The likes of snooker and rugby union have only provided one winner each, while rugby league and darts have never seen SPOTY winners, much to the chagrin of many followers of these largely working class sports.

Whatever your view of the award and the glamourous ceremony that comes with it, there’s no doubt that there are some brilliant sportspeople among the winners. There’s also little doubt that when an athlete performs well on the world stage, they put themselves in a brilliant position to take top spot when the SPOTY award is dished out.