Judging by Tony McCoy's speech upon receiving the 2010 BBC Sports Personality of the Year award he was not seriously expecting to win it. For sure, he was the bookies' favourite - not for the first time in his career. But then Jensen Button was the bookies's favourite last year when the award went, for no particular reason, to Ryan Giggs.

McCoy's speech was all the more charming for its disorganised and humble tone as he described the experience of standing in front of so many sporting high achievers, many of whom he had followed for years on television, as "surreal", and rounded his address off with a heartfelt but puzzling reference to his three-year-old daughter who would be watching him on television at home.

The 36-year-old from County Antrim has had an annus mirabilis even by his own soaring standards, earning the title of Champion Jockey for the 15th successive year and, at the 15th time of asking, winning the Grand National.

Yet his reluctance to assume he would therefore become the first horse racer to earn this award since it was instituted in 1954 was doubtless influenced by his experience of the previous year, when, despite winning his customary Champion Jockey award and riding the 3,000th winner of his career, he did not even make the final short-list. Despite the fact that the Racing Post used its front page to plead his case to the panel.

"I was third in 2002, but if Frankie Dettori never won it for riding seven winners at Ascot, then no jockey's going to get involved in it," McCoy maintained last year.

"What McCoy excels in is his consistency and it's quite a hard thing for that to get recognition in an event such as Sports Personality of the Year because it's moments that tend to catapult those individuals," said John Maxse, the Jockey Club's PR manager, last year.

Fast forward to 2010, and McCoy, with his Grand National win, had the required catapault. But the catapault theory doesn't hold universally good. As the admirable Giggs demonstrated last year. No one would begrudge this model footballer the trophy - but why not give it to him in a year of particular glory.

At such points the Sports Personality Award begins to feel a bit like the Oscars, with certain figures being rewarded in a manner slightly out of sync with their best efforts, as if by way of compensation or apology.

Then again, part of the appeal of the Sports Personality award since Paul Fox dreamed it up as a nifty promotional tool for his BBC Sportsview programme in 1954 has been its ability to stir opinion. In the first year, for instance, the big old camera went to Chris Chataway, dashing victor over the supposedly unbeatable Soviet Vladimir Kuts in a 5,000 metres race at White City in which he broke the world record. And it was all live on BBC TV.



But that meant no big old camera for the athlete whom Chataway had helped pace to the arguably more profound achievement of the first sub-four minute mile earlier that year, Roger Bannister. Shock horror.

Over the years, this award to the sportsperson "whose actions have most captured the public's imagination" has gone to some unlikely recipients. In 1997, for instance, it went to our naturalised Canadian Greg Rusedski after he had got to the US Open final before losing to Pat Rafter. A fine achievement - but did he deserve to keep Steve Redgrave out the top spot?

At least the Oscar committee made it up to the rower three years later when he was named Golden Sports Personality of the Year to mark the programme's 50th anniversary.

Giggs needed just 151,000 votes to win the award last year, a relatively low total from an audience of 7.2 million. It was estimated that McCoy would have needed at least 200,000 votes this time around to secure the treasured tripod, and he raised a ripple of laughter in the all-star audience as he wryly acknowledged all the racing people who must have been voting for him from the moment lines opened. The recorded figure was 293,1532, which represented a landslide victory ahead of world darts champion Phil Taylor and world and European heptathlon champion Jessica Ennis.

Not that Ian Poulter was happy with the general opinion. The Ryder Cup golfer, as you might expect, was miffed that neither of his victorious colleagues from Celtic Manor, world number one Lee Westwood (fourth with 58,640) and US Open champion Graeme McDowell (fifth with 52,108) had won. And particularly miffed, according to his Twittering, with a darts player finishing ahead of the pair.

"Darts comes second in the BBC Spoty voting get a grip," tweeted the unhappy golfer.

However you argue it, the Spoty still has what it takes to stir up this sporting nation of ours.

Mike Rowbottom, one of Britain's most talented sportswriters, has covered the last five Summer and four Winter Olympics for The Independent. Previously he has worked for the Daily Mail, The Times, The Observer, the Sunday Correspondent and The Guardian. He is now chief feature writer for insidethegames