Here’s a pub quiz question: name the last three winners of BBC Sports Personality of the Year. No Googling, no conferring, no points for vaguely thinking it was that cyclist. Got it? Right, now list the ways in which these acclaimed sporting role models have directly influenced your behaviour for the last three years. And then pause to consider what, if anything, the phrase “sporting role model” actually means.
It should go without saying that the boxer Tyson Fury’s views on both gay people and women are offensive to very many people; and that insofar as I care who wins Spoty, which isn’t enormously far, I’d rather it wasn’t a raging homophobe who thinks a woman’s place is “in the kitchen or on her back”. The BBC can insist until it’s blue in the face that this is all about the deathly serious matter of sportsing and not about the personality implicit in the title but, frankly, it hasn’t got a leg to stand on; if this were just about recognising professional achievement, like a Nobel prize or an Oscar, there’d be no need for millions of sofa-bound amateurs to deliberate between Andy Murray and Jessica Ennis-Hill. “Spoty” is basically an old fashioned popularity contest in the feel-good Christmas telly tradition, and the BBC is paying the price of managing to make it feel neither good nor festive this year.
But arguing over whether people who excel at hitting a ball (or indeed a person) should also be role models, spurring the rest of us on to better lives? That seems weirdly pointless, given there’s scant evidence they can achieve anything of the sort even when they try.
A few years ago, SportScotland commissioned a review of the effectiveness of using sporting celebrities to inspire more people into doing sport. Its author somewhat dolefully concluded that, despite endless programmes fronted by famous names, “no impacts have been robustly demonstrated”. And while sporting heroes excel at shifting merchandise, as anyone currently being pestered for a football kit for Christmas can testify, wanting the boots with David Beckham’s name on the box is a very long way from resolving to be a better person just because Beckham seems like a nice guy on Instagram.
This isn’t just about sport. Teenage girls are knee-deep in strong role models in practically every area of public life; you can barely open a women’s magazine without seeing some high-flying mother of four lauded for showing girls what’s possible. Yet the result is a generation almost as conservative as Tyson, according to a depressing poll published this week by the Young Woman’s Trust, which found almost a third of women under 30 thought it irresponsible for mothers of small children to work (against 19% of older women), while younger women were more likely than older ones to consider traditionally “male” professions out of their reach. Puzzlingly, girls’ horizons seem to be narrowing just when they should have been blown wide open.
Tougher economic times might well be making younger women more pessimistic, of course. And some may be rebelling against the pressure-cooker expectations imposed in school. But you have to wonder how effective distant glossy role models can be: whether girls look at Sheryl Sandberg leaning in at Facebook, or Ennis-Hill winning world championship gold a year after having a baby, and simply fail to see their own lives reflected back at them.
Ask successful women about their role models, after all, and more often than not they’ll name someone they knew: a mentor at work, an inspiring speaker, their own mothers. Teenage girls absorb ideas of how to look from celebrity selfies, but perhaps take an idea of what to do from closer to home – and in many families, what women do hasn’t changed all that much in 30 years.
Wider culture seeps in through the cracks, but what counts most for children is what they see every day, up close and personal – which in Tyson Fury’s case was a father currently in jail for gouging someone’s eye out in a fight, and a mother who went through 14 pregnancies (only four babies survived) while her husband kept a second family down the road. It’s not an excuse for offensive views but it is a big fat clue to how they’re formed.
So what to do about the 130,000-plus signatories of a petition demanding a boxer who has openly described himself as “messed-up”, and occasionally “suicide-sad” be kicked off the Spoty shortlist?
The first lesson for the BBC is that a format devised in the 1950s needs urgent overhauling for an era of doping scandals, corruption, lurid rape cases involving footballers and unwise outbursts on social media. It would frankly struggle to justify excluding Fury under current rules, which aside from sporting achievements merely ask the expert panel producing its shortlist to consider the impact individuals have “above and beyond” sport. That sounds more like a euphemism for “pick someone viewers have heard of” than for exercising moral judgment. If bringing sport into disrepute is to mean automatic disqualification, then the BBC should say so upfront.
But let’s not kid ourselves. Whatever happens to Fury now – and personally, I’d leave him on the shortlist and let him lose – will be more about the corporation’s relationship with licence-fee payers and its own mortified staff than with modelling good behaviour to the nation. Adults who share Fury’s more repugnant convictions won’t change overnight just because the BBC makes a martyr of him. And for kids it’s the reaction of the genuine role models in their lives – parents and sports coaches and other kids or adults they like – that are crucial.
It’s not what Tyson Fury says about gay people that counts in the end. It’s what happens when these things filter down to the places teenagers live and the people they know; whether someone bothers to talk to them about what it all means, and explain why actually they’re voting for someone else instead this year. His reputation tarnished and his sporting achievement oddly diminished, Tyson Fury has been transformed from hero to pantomime villain in the space of a week; he’s already lost in every way that counts. What remains is to tell your kids that story.
