It should be the biggest no-brainer of the sporting year. After a summer where athletics has captured hearts and headlines, and made so many fans fall back in love with it again, either Amy Hunt or Josh Kerr should win the award for BBC Sports Personality of the Year.
The bookies’ odds suggest many others think the same way: Hunt is the even-money favourite, Kerr is second, with Harry Kane a stride or two back in third. Yet Kerr knows he cannot take anything for granted.
In 2023 the 28-year-old Scot won the world 1500m title in a clash for the ages against Jakob Ingebrigtsen. But then he fell foul of the BBC’s curious reluctance to pick two athletes from the same sport in its six-person shortlist. Instead the wheelchair tennis player Alfie Hewett, and Rory McIlroy, who won four of his five Ryder Cup matches that year, got the nod ahead of him.
“Spoty is massively important,” Kerr said after winning the Ultimate Championship in Budapest. “Everyone grew up watching it. It’s a massive award, and I would be truly honoured to be on that shortlist up against some of the best athletes of all time this year. I would love to go, but it’s not a given, that’s the reality.”
Kerr is right to be cautious given that only twice since 2017 has the BBC veered off its informal policy. The first came in 2019 when the athletes Dina Asher-Smith and Katarina Johnson-Thompson were selected. Then it happened again when the footballers Hannah Hampton and Chloe Kelly got the nod.
However, on both occasions, those selections helped to balance the male-female split. But in a year where Kane could win the Ballon D’Or, Matt Weston has won two Winter Olympic medals, Luke Littler has dominated darts, and McIlroy won the Masters again, it is not a given the BBC will necessarily go for both track and field stars.
Kerr’s claims are surely stronger than anyone given he obliterated a world mile record that had stood for 27 years, and backed it up by winning the world indoor, Commonwealth Games and Ultimate Championship.
Late on Sunday night he accepted that amounted to pretty much the perfect season. “Outside of an Olympic year, I can’t give any more than that,” he said. “I’m a clean athlete doing it the right way, trying to show the way that I’m doing it. And you know, that’s all I can give. This, genuinely, has been the best year of my career.”
Next year he wants to go for the world 1500m record, but he stressed it would not be easy. “People don’t know what that toll is on your body,” he said. “It feels like getting hit by a bus the next day.” Kerr also wants Hunt on the shortlist. “She’s had a fantastic season,” he said. “She deserves to be there.”
Last month Hunt became the first person in the 96-year history of the European Athletics Championships to win four gold medals. Few athletes have a bigger personality as she showed again at the weekend by speaking out against Sydney Sweeney sexualising sport, and about the difficulties of performing when on her period.
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“This year has been all about finding how to paint a beautiful picture out of all the chaos,” Hunt said. “If I had a camera crew with me at all times, it would have been like a horror film.
“I’ve done 40-plus races, 60 flights. There’s not going to be a single year that will be harder. It’s not pretty. It’s not glamorous. It’s not sexy all the time. It’s rare you turn up on the start line, fully fit without anything going on.”
Yet she kept powering through. Now Hunt, like Kerr, is hoping the BBC does the right thing by selecting both of them for the Spoty awards night as a reward for the impact they have had.
“I think it would be incredibly special if we could get two track and field athletes on the Spoty shortlist,” she said. “I get messages every day from people saying I fell out of athletics, I stopped watching it, I stopped doing it. But watching Europeans has really made me kind of fall back in love with it, and I’m training again, or I’ve done my first parkrun, and that’s really incredibly special.”