To understand the level of sporting excellence that now passes for normality in this country, it helps to spool back 25 years. In 1991, the figure who attracted the most votes for BBC Sports Personality of the Year was not exactly a headline name. Indeed, he derived his greatest fame from his skill in catching a few unsuspecting mirror carp. But a rousing show of unity among the angling fraternity ensured that Bob Nudd, no less, was propelled to the top of the public poll.
Britain cannot claim a monopoly on such perverse outcomes. In Australia, the 2012 award for Sportswoman of the Year was given, in a defiant display of Antipodean chauvinism, to Black Caviar, who happened to be a horse. The BBC, at least, could not countenance the thought of their cherished bauble being handed to a fisherman, giving it to Liz McColgan instead. A quarter of a century on, it is difficult to imagine that such hijacking of the award by niche pursuits would be possible again.
Even among the expanded cluster of 16 nominees at tonight’s ceremony in Birmingham, the shortlist standard is astonishingly high. In 2016, one needs to have won a minimum of an Olympic gold medal, two Paralympic golds, a Premier League title or a Masters green jacket to make the cut. As ever, the exclusivity of this club is also illustrated by the pedigree of those excluded. The British waited 109 years to toast a champion in the Tour de France but today, it seems, there is no room for Chris Froome, who this year won it for a third time.
The pedestal reserved for homegrown heroes has become a crowded place, and it has happened with jolting suddenness. In 1997, Britain could muster no finer feat than that of Greg Rusedski, who took the BBC’s top honour after he reached the US Open final – and lost. Never, though, was there a more glaring paucity of worthy contenders than in 2006, when Zara Phillips took the famous silver-plated camera for her triumph at the World Equestrian Games in Aachen, an event that few outside the Jilly Cooper set even watched.
Andy Murray, a racing certainty to become the first triple winner of the prize this evening, has shredded such modest precedents, establishing a benchmark with which Britain is not familiar. Unlike Rusedski, once acclaimed as a sensation of British tennis for competing in a single major final, Murray has played in 11 of them. Over the past 12 months, for good measure, he has also thrown in a second Wimbledon title, a second Olympic singles gold, and the year-end world No 1 ranking, a distinction that required him to win 24 straight matches to earn.