BBC Sports Personality of the Year Helen Rollason Award BBC Sports Personality of the Year Helen Rollason Award The BBC Sports Personality of the Year Helen Rollason Award is an award given annually as part of the BBC Sports Personality of the Year ceremony each December. The award is given "for outstanding achievement in the face of adversity", and the winner is selected by BBC Sport. The award is named after the BBC sports presenter Helen Rollason, who died in August 1999 at the age of 43 after suffering from cancer for two years. Helen Rollason was the first female presenter of "Grandstand". After being diagnosed with cancer, she
Grandstand (TV programme) results as they came through, with the characters in each result appearing one by one. Remarkably, only two people regularly read out the classified results on "Final Score" when it was part of Grandstand: the Australian Len Martin (from the first programme until his death in 1995) and Tim Gudgin (from 1995 until Final Score was separated from Grandstand in 2001 – he continued to read the classified results until 2011). For twenty years (1965–1985) "Grandstand" faced competition from ITV's "World of Sport", but by the end of the 1980s ITV had stopped broadcasting Saturday afternoon sport in favour of