Sports Personality of the Year 2011

Usually on BeeTeeSports, I mainly cover football stories, because that's my main interest. But for tonight, we shall be looking at the Sports Personality awards for 2011 (just to clear up confusion, this has nothing to do with a sportsman’s personality, it's how well they've done throughout the calendar year in their own respective sports). No footballers are on the shortlist this year, which suggests that we tend to be better in other sporting activities (which is of course, true). Among the nominees are two cricketers, three golfers, two runners, a boxer, a tennis player and a cyclist. It will be quite a long read if I was to analyse the achievements of each individual athlete, so I will discuss my top three candidates for this year...

3RD: Mo Farah

Farah started the year in spectacular fashion. Before April, he had already managed to smash the record for the 5000m indoor record in a time of 13:10.60, win gold at the 3000m indoor championships and also come first in the New York half-marathon (in a very respectable time of 1:00:23). All of these achievements were probably helped by his move to the United States in February to join up with trainer Alberto Salazar. During June/July, he broke British records in the Diamond League meetings at Monaco and Oregon. By the time of the World Athletic Championships, the Somalian-born athlete was full of confidence and showed to the world how good he was by winning silver in the 10,000m and gold in the 5000m (his less favoured event of the two) to top off a good year for the long distance runner.

2ND: Mark Cavendish

Cavendish had a rather slow start to the season, not winning a race until Stage 6 of the Tour of Oman in late February. However, he will be most remembered this year for his tremendous success during the Tour de France. He won five stages of the tour to finish top of the Points Classification tables, despite having points docked off during stages 18 and 19. He finished with a total of 334 points, the highest amount scored since Erik Zabel won in 1997. Mark also became the first British cyclist to top the points table. Other notable achievements during the calendar year include winning the UCI Road World Championships for Great Britain and Grote Scheldeprijs, as well as receiving an MBE as recognition of his accomplishments  

1ST: Luke Donald

The newly crowned world number one certainly had his triumphs throughout the calendar year. He won the WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship in February, beating the then world number one Martin Kaymer 3&2 in the final round. He also managed to pick up one more PGA Tour win and two more European tour wins, which helped him to becoming the first player ever to top the PGA Tour and European Tour money lists in the same year (earning about £7.8m overall). Donald enjoyed success in the Masters, finishing tied in the top four, which was his highest finish in a major during the year. Although a major victory still eludes Donald, his current form suggests that he will most definitely win one during 2012...

The ceremony kicks off at 8pm on BBC1, and if you have faith in BeeTeeSports, you might want to put a lucky wager on Luke Donald to win.