OPINION | BBC Sports Personality of the Year snub of Tadej Pogacar presents bigger problem in attitudes towards cycling

It's the BBC. Who cares outside of little Britain.

If Valentino Rossi could never win during his period of dominance, and massive personality, then Pogacar not winning isn't a massive surprise.

Cycling isn't a Premier League global sport......only one event reaches the mainstream every year - and that's not good enough.

Is the BBC really so important?

The article gives a lot of food but lacks much thought. Cycling was PERMANENTLY damaged by one guy’s quest for invincibility and lost a lot of followers that were helping to make it more mainstream. The days of British glory (track, Sky, Wiggins. Froome, Ineos) which were also permitting Anglo media (the dominant form for global influence) to sell the sport as mainstream, are also dead. Many sports don’t have a season’s worth of events to report on, the media focuses on one huge event WC/Olympics and that’s sll that counts, cycling is the opposite, the WC hardly counts whereas traditional races are considered more noteworthy and riders pick and choose races according to a personal agenda, there is no single culminating event and each is more important to some and most important to a few, how is a general reporter to make sense of comparisons in such an individualistic structure? Awards are usually consensus based and there are just not enough people following cycling for it to score high across the board.

Sometimes there is not a single or simple reason for things, it is just the cumulative effect of many effects influencing things and in this case, there are dozens. In most countries’ media a sport like cricket or darts or rugby or even the whole Commonwealth results would be completely overlooked too, this may not be the case in the UK or at the Beeb but it does highlight how different perceptions are from different places and people, sumo or wrestling, kayak, judo, karate, have any of these ever even been considered? I don’t know but probably boxing has. A sport has to be commercially popular enough to count, the problem with cycling is, it SEEMS popular but isn’t that just a bias because it’s kind of free? How many fans would really remain if you had to pay a 50€ entrance fee to look from the sidelines, and that’s the thing, the majority of people don’t really watch the SPORT, they enjoy being part of the event and moment and know very little about things. True followers are very rare as the number of commentators on websites such as this one show. Riders also just aren’t interesting enough personalities to interest mainstream media, they have very few newsworthy incidents and even when, the murdering of a wife remained largely internal to the cycling media. It seems as if the cycling powers that be don’t promote cycling news to the outside world, perhaps from lack of budget to persuade general media to report (and we know some sport federations have huge budgets to convince media and reporters to make space for them, look how many pages of national newspapers were dedicated to lower league sports results or even horse racing compared to cycling, gambling companies also influence this as they obviously have more interest in promoting data their clients are likely to be interested in.

Anyway, these are just some more aspects the cycling federations should reflect on before ordering an expensive audit to understand why we can’t pull our weight on the global sport scene.

who cares about the BBC? Let them continue to reward the dirty and every year more violent football, actually, a BBC award is an insult.

Would it be wise to include Pogacar though? I don’t think so. In case he won they’d have to strip him of the award in a few years time anyway. Thermonuclear performances from March to October, no single bad day, 100km solo rides, beating EPO times by minutes, team principals involved in number of doping scandals in the past and most importantly massive improvement during one off-season. If cycling history had taught us anything, it’s that you can’t believe in miracles. Sorry Dopačar

No one- aside from dorks like us- cares about cycling. Get over it, and enjoy the sport for what it is. External validation is neither necessary nor valuable.

You're mostly preaching to the converted on here, but this was still a thoroughly enjoyable article. Firstly I was incensed; as close to a perfect season as you're ever going to see in this era and it isn't good enough to make the shortlist?! Then I became reflective and pondered the sheer amount of joy I experienced from watching a great at work this year. Now I'm happy again.

It's not about cycling nor about Tadej it's increasingly about the BBC. The SPOTY awards increasingly is about the few sports they have in their portfolio and the incessant push to be the most diverse organisation in sport, in fact in many ways now they have gone so far they other way. Awarding Cav a lifetime achievement award might be the last cycling ever sees other than track because they don't show it. The SPOTY night used to be widespread viewing in Britain, viewer numbers have plummeted in recent years. Sadly it's an anachronism, more about rewarding mediocrity if it fits their diverse agenda.