Mo Farah or Bradley Wiggins for Sports Personality of the Year?

The Greatest Team GB ever!

History has been made, a record breaking year for British sport has left us absolutely spoiled with riches over the past few months, with so many incredible triumphs from teams and individuals all across the board. The now dubbed 'Super Saturday' will live long in the memory where three Athletics golds were posted, most notably from the face of the Olympics, Sheffield's very own poster girl Jessica Ennis. Honorable mentions and headline grabbers will go to the likes of Chris Hoy, Ben Ainslie, Victoria Pendleton, Katherine Grainger and Nicola Adams, and those Paralympic superhumans of Sarah Storey, David Weir, Hannah Cockroft and Ellie Simmonds to mention just a handful in a pot of many great champions in this the most competitive sporting year, arguably of all time!

It is wrong to say one achievement is greater than another as the Brits were dancing with the stars this summer but for me two athletes in particular stand out.

Wiggo the time trialing machine!

The all conquering European, World and now Olympic Champion Mo Farah and Bradley Wiggins, Olympic Time Trial Champion and Tour de France extraordinaire!

Lightning Bolt meets the Mobot!

So who will earn one of the most coveted accolades Britain has to offer - the 'Mobot' or sideburns 'Wiggo'?

First to our cycling phenomenon, no not Chris Hoy, (he has already won it!) introducing the brilliant Bradley Wiggins.
To win an Olympic medal is an incredible achievement, to win a gold medal is just monumental but to win 7 Olympic medals, 4 of them gold, defies belief!
Not content with his 6 medals prior to the London 2012 Olympics, 'Wiggo' sought to conquer the grandest and toughest cycling event of them all, the Tour de France.
Wiggins accomplished this with considerable aplomb, dismissing all competition with apparent ease.
Team Sky's controlled and assured assistance helped to increase the margin of victory further still, winning by a commanding 3 minutes 21 seconds (more than the combined total of the past two Tour winning margins) to become the first British winner of the Tour de France in the Tour's 107 year history.

Let us rewind back to 2010, where the picture was far from rosy, an out of sorts and disheveled Bradley Wiggins probably would not have even dreamt of being a Tour de France contender, let alone future winner. Why is that I hear you ask? Well after a very respectable 4th place finish in the 2009 Tour de France, expectations were even higher the following year and now as team leader of newly formed Team Sky the pressure to deliver grew tenfold. Unfortunately these plans failed to materialise as Wiggins had a poor Giro d'Italia coming 40th and an equally disappointing Tour de France finishing in a lowly 24th, almost 40 minutes behind the eventual winner.
A time of reflection and re-evaluation occurred, mainly due to a tongue lashing from Sky Chief Dave Brailsford on the back end of the 2010 Tour. Wiggins it seemed had gone backwards and personally admitted 'I couldn't carry on like that, 2010 was a year of disappointment and public humiliation'. Never again!

Through sheer dedication and meticulous planning involving new training methods (altitude training in Tenerife, increasing power outputs and sophisticated scientific training plans introduced by Physiologist Tim Kerrison, British Cycling doctor Richard Freeman and personal coach Shane Sutton) a reinvigorated Wiggo roared back into life in 2011. After winning the Criterium du Dauphine, the main warm up event to the Tour, Wiggins claimed he was 'in the best shape of his life' exhibiting a boisterous and confident mood ahead of that years Tour.
Lady luck however had other plans. The Londoner's Tour hopes were dashed early thanks to a nasty fall culminating in a broken collarbone effectively ending a distraught Wiggins Tour hopes for another year.

Injury heartache

Wiggins, who had shed 6kg after ending his track career to concentrate on the Tour in 2009, lost a further 2kg ahead of the 2012 season in an effort to improve his optimal power to output ratio in the lead up to the 2012 Tour de France despite a strong 3rd place showing at the Vuelta a Espana.
The 2012 season started with an ominous warning shot to his rivals as he became the first man ever to win the prestigious European events of Paris-Nice, Tour de Romandie and the Criterium du Dauphine titles on the spin.
This undoubtedly enhanced his Tour de France credentials and he was billed as the hot favourite to win the holy grail of cycling trophies, the Maillot Jaune or the Yellow Jersey. And he didn't disappoint did he?
Wiggins turned on the style to win the biggest cycling event in the world at a canter as the opposition were left trailing in his wake. Not only did he win by over three minutes to second placed teammate Chris Froome, who played a huge part in making this victory possible, who rode with him every pedal turn of the way, Wiggins won both time-trials with apparent ease to boot.
Tour de France Champion. Let me say that again, TOUR DE FRANCE CHAMPION! It really does not get any better than that surely. The amiable, bloke-next-door, family man has now joined the cycling legends of Armstrong, his hero Indurain, Hinault and Merckx, a phenomenal achievement.

Right, that is it; I am convinced he deserves the award. Wait there is more?

Victorious!

Of course there is! Bradley's golden, or should I say yellow, summer wasn't setting just yet.
Once again this cycling machine rode away brilliantly from his competitors to cap off an incredible few weeks by winning the gold medal in the Olympic Time Trial in front of the British masses. Let us not forget that this was not even a fortnight after his lung busting victory at the Tour which makes this feat all the more impressive.

So there you have it; from doom and gloom just two years ago to Tour de France and Olympic Time Trial champion. Can anyone match this feat?

Enter Mo Farah.
Like Wiggins, Mo Farah has come on leaps and bounds in an extraordinary career.
The first time Farah came into the public's consciousness was by bursting onto the scene in 2006 when he agonisingly lost out on a gold medal in the European championship 5000m but redeemed himself later that year by storming to the European Cross Country Championship. Finally it seemed, Mo Farah had arrived.

At just 24 years of age many tipped this precocious Somalian born athlete, now British International, for greatness after a stellar season. This greatness however was put on hold during the biggest year of racing in Mo's life, the Olympic year.
The Brit toiled in the clammy, humid conditions of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and disappointingly failed to make the 5000m final. Understandably Mo cut a dejected and forlorn figure as he exited the Bird's nest with his tail between his legs but, like Wiggins, for Mo Farah, although it didn't seem like it at the time, the only way was up from here on in.

Off season altitude training in Africa

What followed in 2009 was a rejuvenated Farah breaking the long-standing British indoor record in the 3000m, a 3000m gold medal at the European Indoor Championships and strong performances in the European Cross Country and World Athletics Championships. Undoubtedly what aided his improvement during another impressive season was his prolonged training in Kenya with the world's top athletes. An optimistic but deflated man entered the hot bed of long distance running and the man that returned was a supremely fit, confident individual primed and ready to make an assault upon the best the world had to offer.

He did not have to wait too long as Mo struck gold twice just a year later by claiming the 5000, 10000m double at the European Athletics Championships, only the fifth man in the competitions 66 year history to do so.
Mo Farah had destroyed all his closest challengers by some margin and there was no question that he was the best...... in Europe, that is.
Despite his fantastic victories many still considered him to be out of his depth when facing the African giants,
an issue Mo sought to address immediately. Although the Brit was a very talented, world class runner he wasn't quite the finished article.

Mo constantly talked about crossing the divide and finally ending the Africans long distance running stranglehold over this distance. An impossible dream? Mo certainly didn't think so.
Before we embark on the long steps Mo took to achieving Olympic gold, let us just consider the mountainous task Mo was about to undertake.
He was attempting to beat the Kenyans and Ethiopians at Long Distance Running, where African athletes have only failed once in the last 30 years to claim gold, an event which has become synonymous with both countries. This is like trying to beat the New Zealand All Blacks in their own backyard, the Jamaicans at sprinting, Canadians at Ice Hockey or an American at a hot dog eating contest. It really is almost impossible!

In the boldest move of his career, Farah split from long term coach Alan Storey in 2011 and acquired the prestigious services of former marathon runner Alberto Salazar, uprooting his family in the process to Oregon in the States. Mo said the reason behind it was to 'find that extra one per cent' that would take him to the next level.
Salazar sought to address Mo's lack of physique through strength training on which he commented Mo 'was the weakest I had ever trained' but 'has more heart, more guts and more soul than any athlete I've ever seen'.
Salazar's tactical astuteness came to the fore as he urged the Brit to go from 600-800m out as the Africans tend to leave the sprint to the last lap which was their greatest strength but also a sign of weakness.
The new partnership was soon put to the test and despite a slow start at the Istanbul World Indoors the pair gathered momentum ahead of the 2011 World Athletics Championships where Farah blossomed into one of the best athletes in the world winning a gold in the 5000m and silver in the 10000m.

Double Olympic Champion!

And the rest, as they say, is history.
Mo Farah not only became the first Britain ever to win a long distance gold at the Olympics, he is now an exclusive member of the now seven man club to win the 5,000 and 10,000m double at a single Olympics, equalling what Kenenisa Bekele, considered by many as the greatest long distance runner of all time, achieved four years ago. You run out of superlatives to describe Mo's stunning achievements this year, the icing on the cake in a glittering career, but a Sports Personality of the year award would go some way to explaining what a monumental accomplishment it has been.

So there you have it. Two sporting legends who conquered the world respectively. Both have come such a long way in a relatively short period of time. So who deserves it more?
We really do need a photo finish for this one but I think Wiggins just shades it perhaps by just a tyre width.

And just as I finish writing this, Andy Murray brilliantly wins the US Open. Well that will certainly put a spanner in the works, talk about timing!