The Grand National winner benefited from that rarest of things ? all elements of racing pulling towards the same goal
The glow from Tony McCoy's success in being named Sports Personality of the Year yesterday will start to fade soon enough, not least if the weather maintains its grip throughout Christmas, but for the next few days at least, it will make the frustration much easier to bear. McCoy's achievement in becoming the first jockey to win the award, which eluded both Frankie Dettori in the year of his Magnificent Seven and Lester Piggott despite nine Derbys, is significant enough. The manner of it, though, may be just as important, since it shows what racing can achieve when everyone works towards a common goal.
McCoy did not just win, he pulverised his nine opponents, polling 293,000 votes, nearly twice as many as Ryan Giggs collected when successful last year. Indeed, that total would have comfortably beaten four of the last five winners of the award ? Joe Calzaghe, Zara Phillips and Andrew Flintoff being the others ? and would have edged out Chris Hoy in 2008 by 10,000 votes, too.
In a way, it should not be a surprise. Racing not only has the second-largest paid attendance of any sport in Britain, but it also employs many thousands of people. If your livelihood depends on something, the incentive to lend it support in a public poll is all the greater.
But even allowing for the many hundreds of racing's fans and workers who voted early and oftenyesterday, there will have been thousands more who called just the once. And many of those will have done so because of the concerted and well-organised campaign throughout the industry to get McCoy to the top of the poll.
One lesson from the final voting figures seems to be that the core electorate for SPOTY is relatively small and rather fickle. Graeme Swann, for instance, finished ninth of 10, beating only David Haye, which can only be a reaction to England's miserable performance in the Third Test. Had the poll been taken a week earlier, with the Ashes still apparently in the bag, it is difficult to believe he would not have polled much higher.
As it was, Swann scraped less than 2% of the 700,000 votes ? which is itself a very small total when set against the many millions cast in the X Factor final ? while McCoy received 20 votes for every one that went to the cricketer. There were, no doubt, a significant number of regular voters who owed McCoy one for his Grand National win, but even so, the Vote McCoy campaign in racing over the last month must have been a huge factor in such an overwhelming success.
And for that, much of the credit belongs to Racing For Change, which identified SPOTY as a good way to reacquaint the general sporting public with horse racing. The first challenge was to get McCoy on to the shortlist for the first time in years, and RFC did its best to make the selectors aware of McCoy's achievements in 2010. Having won the Grand National, of course, he might have made the list anyway, but it may be no coincidence that McCoy was the only person on the shortlist to be nominated by all 30 of the panellists who compile the final 10 names.
After that, it was really just a marketing exercise, but an extensive and well-constructed one that can have left no one in racing unaware that McCoy was up for the award and needed their vote. Race titles were changed, the bookies weighed in with Vote McCoy logos on betting slips, and he was name-checked relentlessly on Channel 4 and in the Racing Post. For a couple of weeks, everyone, the bookmakers included, was on the same side, and it worked better than anyone could have expected.
Racing For Change does not hold a monopoly on truth, far from it, but the bile that its very name elicits from some quarters has become an almost Pavlovian response. They got this one right, though, and helped to ensure that a great jockey received the recognition he deserves.
Incineration James Beattie The X Factor Theatre Bolton Wanderers Radio 1
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