Sports Personality of the Year 2017

Surprised we didn't have a thread for SPOTY this year.

Anyway, a bit of an anticlimax as the link to St Mary's University failed when Mo Farah was announced as winner.



Apart from that, the usual dragging out the first two hours and then rushing towards the end and still managing to over-run by 10 minutes.

Disappointing there was no presentation to Roger Federer for the Overseas award, not even a pre-recorded thank you.

Man, I miss when it was the Sports *Review* of the Year and we had the Funnies before the main award was presented...

There's a good reason why you should set your satellite receivers to output black on loss of input...

I'm not suggesting she had anything to do with it, but Jo Konta was at the same location as Mo Farah, and they'd have had to tell her she hadn't won it to make sure Mo was on the sofa...

Who pulled the plug? 😳
1. Lewis Hamilton
2. Chris Froome
3. Anthony Joshua#SPOTY

— Dan Walker (@mrdanwalker) December 17, 2017

Not sure what's better, black or a freeze frame. The caption is the worst option though


Presumably that was being downlinked at the OB, AFAIK, none of the BBCs receivers are set to do that

I know the following isn't exactly TV related - but it *is* SPOTY related, and I do want to get it off my chest somewhere...

While I'm happy that Mo won, it does have to go down as a bit of a shock. He was as much as 33/1 to win, while Anthony Joshua was around 1/8 - and indeed, as little as 1/100 was being offered on Joshua finishing in the top three.

In the end, he was pipped for third by Jonnie Peacock by all of 18 votes. Yes, *eighteen*. I wonder how much of a role Strictly played there...?

And Jonathan Rea finished only around 3,000 votes behind Mo (less than 23,000 votes covered the top six, which must be the closest in quite some time). If he had won, that definitely would have been a shock - maybe even one of the all-time SPOTY shocks...

It's hard not to notice that the four women in the shortlist made up the bottom four, with fewer votes combined than Chris Froome in seventh. Oh well, at least Anya Shrubsole and her team won one of the other awards...

The feed from St Mary's University was FTA on 10E with an ID of "Mo Twickenham". I had been watching it on and off throughout the show and Mo was brought back to the sofa a couple of minutes before the result was announced.

It seems to have been an uplink problem as the feed went down for me too at the same time as the BBC issue. It came back on just as the closing credits were running on BBC One.

At least they release the results in full, and tonight was absolutely a result that required that - the whole top three was a shocker really. Happy for Mo though - he deserves to have SPOTY on his CV, even though he wasn't my pick for this year.

I think the trouble with a show like SPOTY is the people who bet and the people who vote are quite different, plus online at least it's restricted to one vote per account.

Unlike Strictly Come Dancing where we don’t know who came 2nd, 3rd or 4th last night and probably never will.

Interesting that it was called "Mo Twickenham" when Jo Konta was in the same place. Clearly they thought she had no chance of winning (she wasn't expected to anyway) and they would have had to have told her she wasn't in the top 3 so that they could have the sofa ready for Mo, I expect that would have also given it away to Mo that he was in the top 3.

Oh apparently they got thr wrong wheelchair tennis player in one of the packages.

@BBCSPOTY thanks for the mention tonight guys on winning 2 slams shame you used a pic of @DylanAlcott tho. @BBCSport #ihavenohair

— Andy Lapthorne (@lapstar11) December 17, 2017

Was it just a case of the show running late and the satellite feed was booked until 9:00 only?