Emma Raducanu has been voted as the BBC Sports Personality of the Year, with Tom Daley second and Adam Peaty third
Emma Raducanu is the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year for 2021, capping a year of unprecedented sporting success for the tennis star who told the show she was simply “a 19-year-old from Bromley … that’s who she is, nothing else to it.”
Collecting her prize remotely, Raducanu wheeled the camera-shaped trophy from beneath her Zoom screen in celebration. “It’s such an honour just to be amongst these nominees, to win … it’s pretty amazing to me. I watched this growing up, so I’m really happy to join the past winners and I’m really happy for British tennis too. This past year has been absolutely insane.
While Sports Personality of the Year celebrates superhuman sporting achievement first and foremost, it has become expert at telling human stories. Just as with the BBC’s other sequin-dotted success, Strictly Come Dancing – the show is expert at drawing universal themes from individual experience. Storey talked of the “intrinsic motivation” that she gained from her early years in training and making the right cup of tea to entice her parents out of bed to give her a lift; Peaty of the transformative effect of becoming a father; and the inspirational story of Arsenal’s Jen Beattie, who took home the Helen Rollason award as a result of her advocacy for sufferers of breast cancer, which she was diagnosed with in 2020.