Gabby Logan is holding an imaginary envelope: precious, golden, the kind that would open over a microphone with a dramatic crunch. Three days before the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award, Logan is larking around in her agent’s office in west London, enacting the crucial moment on Sunday night when Gary Lineker will pull out the card that bears the winner’s name. “Imagine Gary,” she says. With a look of joyful anticipation, she raises the make-believe envelope flap – and then her smile collapses. A look of horror takes its place. She is pretend-discovering that the fancy script on the card reads “Tyson Fury”.
More than 130,000 people have signed a petition demanding that Fury, one of 12 contenders for the award, be removed from its shortlist after the world heavyweight champion shared his worldview with the Mail on Sunday last month. “There are only three things that need to be accomplished before the devil comes home,” he said. “One of them is homosexuality being legal in countries, one of them is abortion and the other one’s paedophilia.” Fury has also suggested that his fellow Spoty contender Jessica Ennis-Hill “slaps up good”, which somehow makes putting on makeup sound abusive. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Fury believes that “a woman’s best place is in the kitchen and on her back”.
So it is easy to understand why Logan’s face falls at this phantom vision of Fury being named winner. Should he be on the shortlist?
“Yeeaah,” she says slowly. “He’s on the list because of his sport. That is the argument that the BBC has put forward, and we all buy into it because that’s the truth of it. He’s not on the list because of his opinions, clearly.” She finds those “objectionable”. On Sunday night, she says, the job of interviewing Fury will fall to Lineker, though Logan and Clare Balding will feed into his preparations.
“We’re all journalists, we’re going to ask the right questions. None of us would do some kind of puff piece.” Logan, 42, will be interviewing Greg Rutherford, the long jump world champion who last week was dissuaded from removing himself from the event in response to Fury’s inclusion. Logan plans “to ask Greg about why he felt so strongly”.
This is all very well, but while Logan articulates the argument in favour of Fury’s inclusion – that the award addresses sporting prowess only, that “we would be mad if we had said, ‘Oh no, no, that’s not enough to get on the list!” – she falters at its logical extension, that it would be acceptable for Fury to win. Because how would she feel if that happened?
“I’d genuinely feel confused,” she says. “Are people voting because they think his achievements from a sporting viewpoint are head and shoulders above the rest? So much so that they can ignore the stuff around him? I would be a bit disappointed. I’d think: ‘Are people trying to be ironic?’ I usually agree with Matthew Syed’s columns, but I wasn’t quite sure I agreed with the column he wrote [in the Times earlier this month] saying he would vote for Tyson Fury to show that it is not about the moral virtues of somebody. I couldn’t work out his argument there, because I think him [Fury] being on the list is enough debate, without him winning. When you compare him to all those other people, there’s plenty to choose from.”
She laughs, because she often punctuates her sentences with laughter, and also because there has been a lot of debate about Fury in her own house, where Radio 5 Live is permanently on and where, as a result, Logan’s twins have caught wind of Fury’s comments. They are only 10, but old enough to disapprove. What did they say? Logan adopts a high-pitched voice: “Why would he say that? What’s he talking about?”
Logan has worked in sports broadcasting since 1996, when she was plucked from her job on Newcastle’s Metro Radio by Sky Sports. Back then, of course, she was Gabby Yorath – her father is the former Leeds footballer and Wales manager Terry Yorath – but over the course of those 19 years, she has made it her job to call out sexism wherever she sees it.
“I’ve had really terrible, horrible things that people say to you that involve your genitals and all kinds of disgusting things,” she says. Three years ago, after Andy Gray and Richard Keys disparaged the work of assistant referee Sian Massey, Logan made a documentary, Sexism in Football, in which she gave voice to the sport’s female workers. She routinely corrects even subtle misdemeanours, such as when a colleague observed that there were no footballers on the Spoty shortlist, to which Logan tartly replied: “Lucy Bronze.” She is unafraid to retweet offensive messages, such as those that advise her to “get back to the kitchen”.
Despite that continuing misogyny, she is keen to emphasise the ways that sport is changing for the better, with Bronze’s nomination a case in point. If she was making her documentary now, she says, “I’d look for positive changes. I was almost brought to tears listening to Lucy Bronze’s mum the other night on the preview programme, because she said something like, ‘I just want more opportunity for girls in sport, never mind football.’ And I think what she recognised was that that team of lionesses doing so well in the summer wasn’t just about football, it was girls competing on a global stage.” She begins to well up. “I’m getting quite tingly saying it.” Her daughter, she says, sees so many more female sportspeople in the news now than when Logan was growing up – back then, Bulgarian gymnastics magazines were the only keyhole to the world she loved.
But if this progress is to continue, isn’t it important to voice opposition to views such as Fury’s more forcefully? “This whole idea that we just shut people up, that’s not the way forward,” she says. “I’d rather have the debate about why what he says, in my eyes, is wrong than tell him to shut up and go away. Because he’s not going to stop thinking or believing that, and he’s not going to stop spouting it, so why don’t we have a conversation about it?
“I don’t agree with people who say that we [the BBC] are somehow backing or supporting his view. I don’t understand how you can say that. Because that would mean that you don’t cover anything. Are we going to start going through with a fine-tooth comb the moral credibility of every sports person that we ever talk about? What’s OK? Are affairs OK? Is cheating on your wife OK? Are drugs OK? Where is the moral compass here? Clearly, there are all kinds of people that make up the sporting community. Some of them are really great, upstanding people. Some of them might have questionable lifestyle choices.”
She begins to talk about her twins, Lois and Reuben. It fascinates her that they are so different even though they have had “exactly the same influences”. Lois is empathetic and organised. She gets up at 6.30am to get the eggs that the chickens have laid, and is so conscientious she has asked for an alarm clock for Christmas. Reuben, on the other hand, eats the eggs. Logan describes him as an “alpha male” (even if he is still capable of giving her a big hug in the supermarket).
“I know I’m slightly digressing,” she says, “but I think my son – he is totally, like, ‘A woman could do anything.’ That doesn’t mean that he’s not going to [have] what we’d see as male traits. They’re never going to leave him, but he’s growing up with the debate. He would think it was ridiculous that somebody said ‘Get back to the kitchen.’”
It is understandable that Logan reaches for the example of her own children, because sport loops through the whole family. Reuben plays rugby, Lois showjumps. Their father, Logan’s husband, is Kenny Logan, the former international rugby player. No family member – neither when Logan was growing up, nor in her own family now – has ever rebelled or tried to escape the grip of sport. Logan goes for runs with her son. Or Lois crashes her mum’s personal training session. For Logan, sport is a strong emotional brace. Her school PE teacher was at her wedding. What is it that sport gives Logan, does she think, that she would not find elsewhere?
“I remember saying to somebody who told me that their girlfriend didn’t like sport, ‘But does she like human endeavour and the ability to triumph over adversity and people conquering all kinds of weaknesses and difficulties in their lives, and I came out with this massive list … I was so annoyed that it was seen as just a pure sporting spectacle. Because that’s not what this is about at all. Across sport, I think it’s that human side of superhuman achievements that I’ve always admired.”
Perhaps this admiration is inevitable given Logan’s childhood. Despite her mother’s attempts to interest the children in drama and music, sport prevailed by the power of their father’s example. “It was the all-encompassing nature of his job,” she says.
Surely in those days, footballers did a couple of hours’ training then lounged around at home? Logan gives a deep sigh. “He was obsessed, though,” she says. “He watched football or talked about football. His friends and social life were dominated by football.” His doodles of tactics and lineups littered the house, and the family moulded into its own formation around him.
Just as Logan and her husband and their children now make up a sort of sporting quad, so the three eldest Yorath siblings and their father would divide themselves into two teams of two after dinner, and play football or put up a washing line for tennis. “Or when we lived in Canada, we had a running track opposite, so we’d go and do races.” Her younger brother Daniel watched televised football with his dad in a near trance. “You know when they say twins have a secret language? You couldn’t really join in,” she says. Then, on very special occasions, such as when Sports Personality of the Year came around, Logan’s mother would join them all on the sofa, a big bowl of crisps on the go, “everyone debating who was going to win”.
That was just the leisure stuff. Then there was the serious training: 30 hours a week for Logan while she was preparing for the Commonwealth games in 1990 (she represented Wales in rhythmic gymnastics). So presumably she did not surprise herself when she married a sportsman?
Logan laughs. “It would have been nice if I’d been a bit less obvious, wouldn’t it? I tried! Different-shaped ball!” It becomes apparent when Logan speaks about sport (“Being competitive is something you need to channel. Otherwise it’s incredibly unattractive” … “I’m a much nicer person for exercise”) that if she doesn’t share her father’s obsessive approach, at the very least she enjoys the idea of serious application. She can still do the splits from her gymnastics days, a skill she practices several times a week, just to make sure she retains it. (And, to prove her point about being competitive, she notes in passing that her daughter can no longer do them.) Logan loves sport – and she loves it in a way that can seem almost dependent.
She says she has always been “quite a good partner” to sportspeople. “I’m all for sacrifice. Me, them. I love the idea – and it’s kind of in my nature – that I’m just not going to achieve anything unless I sacrifice something.” As a schoolgirl, training for the Commonwealth games, her friends were all starting to drink and go out. “And of course I was not doing any of that, and I was really happy that I was able to visibly see what my sacrifice was and be in control of that.”
Logan speaks quickly, as if talking were also a kind of discipline, but now she is finishing all her sentences, and you can feel the tension in the close attention she is paying to her words. “I spoke to a very well known rugby player’s dad during the world cup,” she says. A lot of her sentences start this way: she must be always talking to people. “And he was on about a girlfriend that he’d had, and he said she wanted him to go away for weekends and not train, and I remember thinking, ‘Why would you?’ It’s almost like you’re stopping somebody’s dream, you’re giving them permission to not have their dreams and not put their dreams into action and achieve what they could achieve.”
She speaks with startling urgency, as if this dream, which belonged to someone else, was something that she needed to defend too. When Logan was 19, her brother Daniel, then 15, collapsed and died of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy while playing football with his dad in the back garden. He had just signed for Leeds United.
“It does change everything in a family,” she says. “You don’t really know what you would be because it’s such a transitional age anyway. Was I going to be this driven person that did a million things? There was definitely a thought process: I’m living two lives now. I’m going to make sure that I live every moment and don’t waste time.”
Maybe this is why she is always so busy. A qualified personal trainer, TV presenter, radio broadcaster, mother of twins, and currently doing edits on a novel for children … Even as she sits and talks, her hands move constantly through a workout of gestures. She is already looking beyond Spoty to 2016. “Olympics, European Championships … ”, time a sort of revolving calendar of sporting events. Does she ever want to escape, to stop the wheel, do something totally different? She looks aghast. “I never want to not do sport.”
Gabby Logan will present BBC Sports Personality of the Year, live from Belfast on BBC One, at 6.50pm on Sunday
