The applause for Keely Hodgkinson was still reverberating around Media City on Tuesday when this year's BBC Sports Personality of the Year began to stare intently at the previous winners carved into the trophy. "I started to read the names and you realise it is history right in front of you: Bobby Moore; Mary Rand; Linford Christie; it goes all the way back to 1954," she said.
But one detail, more than anything, stood out. The Olympic 800m champion's victory was a record-breaking fourth in a row for a woman, following the tennis player Emma Raducanu in 2021 and the footballers Beth Mead and Mary Earps in 2022 and 2023. "It shows that women's sport in the UK is in a good place," Hodgkinson said.
It is certainly a far cry from a desperate stretch between 2007 and 2020 when a male athlete not only lifted the award every year, but only five women - the swimmer Rebecca Adlington, the athletes Jessica Ennis-Hill, Jo Pavey and Dina Asher-Smith and the jockey Hollie Doyle - made the podium.
This story is from the December 19, 2024 edition of The Guardian.
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This story is from the December 19, 2024 edition of The Guardian.
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