By Bruce Millington10.13AM 12 NOV 2009
Racing Post editor Bruce Millington with an open letter to the sports editors who will between them choose the ten candidates for this year's prestigious award
FRIDAY is the deadline for you to submit the ten names you nominate for the BBC Sports Personality of 2009 shortlist.
On behalf of the whole sport of racing, I respectfully urge you to give careful consideration to the overwhelming case for Tony McCoy to be included on your list.
This is not some desperate voice from a far-flung parish of the sporting world defying logic and natural justice and banging the drum for an unworthy candidate.
It's a plea to correct one of the great sporting wrongs of recent times - namely that the British public has never been afforded the opportunity to show how much it appreciates the phenomenon that is McCoy in the annual BBC poll.
This has been a year that has seen some notable British sporting performances. Jenson Button, Jessica Ennis and David Haye became world champions; England's cricketers won the Ashes, and Mark Cavendish proved himself the fastest man on two wheels in the Tour de France.
Meanwhile, for the 14th successive year, McCoy became champion jump jockey, and chalked up his 3,000th winner, a feat that would have been considered as good as impossible back in 1992 when he registered his very first riding success.
He should not, however, be nominated as some form of lifetime recognition. 2009 has seen the Ulsterman perform every bit as supremely as ever, despite him, at 35, entering what is the veteran stage for jump jockeys.
He has ridden 179 winners in Britain this year, sits 33 clear of his nearest rival in the 2009-10 championship, and is still causing jaws to drop with his logic-defying ability to pass the post in front on horses which would be beaten with any other human in the saddle.
His performance on Wichita Lineman at the Cheltenham Festival was widely recognised as one of the all-time great rides, with no less a sportswriting legend than Hugh McIlvanney commenting in the Sunday Times: "McCoy electrified the old arena in the Cotswolds with a miracle of persistence and communicated conviction that finally galvanised the ill-travelling, erratically jumping Wichita Lineman into surging beyond Maljimar (and the bounds of believability) to finish a neck in front."
Like Ryan Giggs, who was crowned footballer of the year in 2009, McCoy shows no signs of diminished talent or desire.
Unlike Giggs, McCoy still requires an ambulance to follow him during his working day and is on a constant diet that equates to nothing other than borderline starvation.
Please be in no doubt what a momentous feat riding 3,000 winners is. As Paul Hayward wrote in The Observer: "To say his pursuit of a 3,000th winner over sticks is just another statistical milestone of the sort that litter modern sport is a calumny against this famished hero of the weighing room.
"It is an epic narrative of simple pleasures denied, crippling injuries overcome, and horses kicked and slapped across finishing lines as an obsessive nature seeks its fulfilment in the flash of an equine head past a giant lollipop."
McCoy is revered in racing and admired throughout the sporting sphere. From the royalty for whom he rides to the multitude of betting shop punters who put their faith in him on a daily basis, this is a man who delivers.
He embodies the great sporting principles of bravery, skill, dignity, success and dedication.
The people of Great Britain may decide he is not the worthiest recipient of the BBC Sports Personality award. But they deserve the chance to make that decision, so please do the right thing and find room in your ten-strong list of candidates for Anthony Peter McCoy.
