SPOTY

[NeilC]

Let's celebrate miserable, obsessional boring athletes, not flamboyant extroverts.

That makes Alastair Cook an even better candidate.

[andypat]

Alastair Cook's achievement owes much less to the efforts of the rest of his team than Mark Cavendish's.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/sports_personality/15759932.stm

Thats a good point you make about the team behind Cavendish, but I'm not sure which of Cook's "acheivements" make him deserving of inclusion. 6th highest test score ever? Would that mean the sixth fastest time ever would get you in for athletics?

I suggest everyone votes for Amir Khan.....

[graeme]

Would that mean the sixth fastest time ever would get you in for athletics?

Maybe - the two nominated athletes weren't even close...

[Scott]

"Highest test score" is a terrible way to judge batting achievement. It would be a bit like comparing times winning times on Black courses at different events - it tells you as much about the conditions (terrain, undergrowth, weather, planning...) at that particular event as it does about the individual performances. Plus nobody in their right mind thinks Matthew Hayden was the second greatest test batsman of all time.

If you want a statistical measure of Cook's achievement, try "most test runs scored by any overseas batsman on a tour of Australia since 1929".

[andypat]

Would that in any way be balanced out by the whitewash he captained England to in India?

[awk]

But 4th in the world is still ahead of "one of the 40 swimming world champions, again'.

Or, indeed, the 20+ running world champions (and those are only the ones in athletics).

It's always dangerous ground comparing the worth of a world champion in one sport against that in another. The fact is that they are the best at what they do. Personally, I'd rate a multiple Taekwondo world champion against, for instance, a player who has yet to win a single tournament at the highest (grand slam) level.

[greywolf]

never mind the sexism, the list is shockingly anthropocentric: i know it's 40 years since a horse won it but i don't see how they could leave out Frankel: more class than Murray, Cook or Strauss and more charisma than all 3 golfers put together