World road race champion Mark Cavendish claimed Britain’s BBC Sports Personality of the Year award on Thursday, beating golfer Darren Clarke and athlete Mo Farah in a public vote.
The 26-year-old, also the Tour de France’s green jersey winner, became only the second road cyclist to take the award, following the late Tommy Simpson’s win in 1965.
Northern Irish golfer Clarke, this year’s champion at The Open, was voted into second place, with world 5,000m gold medalist Farah third.
The build-up to this year’s showpiece event was overshadowed by a row over the lack of any women on the 10-strong shortlist despite a year that produced several British female world champions.
Cavendish, who is one of Britain’s top hopes for a home gold at next year’s London Olympics, topped this year’s Tour de France’s points table after winning five stages and followed it up with a thrilling win in the World Road Race Championships in Denmark in September.
The BBC award capped off a fine year for the Isle of Man-born cyclist, awarded a Member of the Order of the British Empire medal last month.
Elsewhere, England’s cricketers were named Team of the Year, with their coach Andy Flower winning the Coach of the Year award, in recognition of their rise to the top of the world Test rankings.
Meanwhile, Wimbledon tennis champion Novak Djokovic won the Overseas Sports Personality of the Year.
Five-time Olympic rowing gold medalist Steve Redgrave won the Lifetime Achievement award and former Grand National winning jockey Bob Champion was given the Helen Rollason Award in recognition of the money he raised for cancer charities since overcoming the disease himself.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier