BBC SPOTY 2024: All you need to know as Olympic triathlon champion Alex Yee bids for HUGE award

It’s been a quite incredible year for Britain’s Olympic triathlon champion Alex Yee, but there is STILL one more major prize up for grabs – BBC Sports Personality Of The Year (better known these days as SPOTY).

For anybody not living in the UK, this is probably the biggest sports award handed out in this nation every year – getting massive publicity in mainstream media. Partly because it is of course backed and handed out by the national broadcaster.

Triathlon has come close before to winning the prize, and now swim/bike/run has another shot with Yee one of the possibles after that epic surge past the gallant Hayden Wilde to claim gold at Paris 2024 in July.

The competition is hot though, as you would imagine with every single sport under the sun having the chance to contend for the big prize. So as the countdown begins, here is all we know ahead of the 2024 spectacular.

Paris 2024 Olympic Games by Wagner Araujo (@wags.photo)

When is BBC SPOTY 2024?

SPOTY will be handed out at a glittering awards ceremony to take place at BBC Sport’s headquarters in MediaCity, Salford, Manchester on Tuesday December 17, 2024. It will of course be televised live to the nation on BBC One so everybody can watch the event unfold.

The ceremony and TV coverage gets under way at 1900 local time – that is 2000 CET, 1400 Eastern Time in the US or 1100 PST if you are watching on the West Coast. The coverage runs for two hours.

How does SPOTY work?

So there are two important milestones set for the next few days:

A shortlist of six athletes will be announced a few days before that awards ceremony, and those athletes will then be in with a chance of winning the hallowed prize. So we will find out then if Alex Yee really does have a shot after all.

Then on Tuesday December 17 in Manchester, the final results will be announced and we will know the 2024 BBC Sports Personality Of The Year.

So who actually decides the contenders, and then the winner? An expert panel will pick that six-athlete shortlist, and then the winner of the award will be decided by a public vote. We’ll add details of how and where you can vote, right here, once official.

Who is favourite for SPOTY?

This is a big deal, so of course there are odds, normally a pretty good place to start when working out who is favourite. Right now Britain’s Olympic 800m champion Keely Hodgkinson is hot favourite, with Alex Yee is 40/1 fourth favourite:

2/7 Keely Hodgkinson

7/2 Luke Littler

16/1 Mark Cavendish

40/1 Alex Yee

50/1 Ben Ainslie

66/1 Helen Glover

66/1 James Anderson

66/1 Lando Norris

66/1 Sarah Storey

80/1 Alfie Hewett

Those 40/1 odds for Alex btw, they were 66/1 a couple of weeks ago so there is support for the man from London. All odds were correct at 0700 UK on Saturday November 30, 2024.

There are other positive signs too – Alex recently claimed the vaunted SJA Sportsman of the Year award, and his triathlon success was voted by the public as the TeamGB Moment of the Games in Paris. So a lot of people remember very well what he did on that epic day in the French capital on July 31.

Triathlon and SPOTY

Triathlon has yet to claim the Sports Personality of the Year award, but it has come close before.

One Alistair Brownlee finished second in the voting behind tennis icon Andy Murray back in 2016. Alistair had just claimed his second Olympic gold in Rio, and even more fresh in the public memory was that famous moment with brother Jonny in Cozumel.

Alistair Brownlee finished second in SPOTY in 2016 after that Olympic success in Rio.