BBC Sports Personality of the Year results summary

So the winner of the BBC Sports Personality concurred with the overall analysis that we undertook, which was Tony McCoy. As we stated yesterday, Tony McCoy was consistently at the top of the analysis that we did, based on tweets made during the past week.

The bookies generally had Graeme McDowell as second favourite, although in our analysis he was well down the list along with fellow golfer Lee Westwood.

The second placed person was Phil Taylor, who trended upwards in our analysis as the week wore on. He actually finished top of the list of the analysis of tweets made during the show, indicating a late swing towards him. However this wasn't sufficient to topple Tony McCoy but moved him into second position. In fact using our contextual analysis we can examine why this is the case. There are a number of words in close context to Phil Taylor in a negative context such as: superfit, insult, athletes, skill. This indicates that people do not think that there is great skill to darts, and that should he win it would be an insult to real athletes. There is also a great deal of negative comment on the fact that Phil Taylor does not exactly have to be 'superfit' to be able to win his championships. This gives an insight into why Phil Taylor didn't win.

In third position was Jessica Ennis, which let's be honest does not fit well with our analysis. Although she was shown in third position in our analysis of tweets made during the show, she was behind Amy Williams. In fact, in our analysis she consistently lagged behind Amy throughout. This is probably due to a couple of reasons, the main one being that the demographic that voted for her is not well represented on twitter.

The higher position of Amy Williams and Mark Cavendish in our list may also be due to twitter campaigns by followers of the respective sportsperson. Since twitter is a 'free' utility, it costs nothing for groups of people to retweet something along the lines of "Amy to win #spoty!" in order to try to influence other people's votes. We have seen this previously with analysis done on shows like the X Factor.

So overall, our analysis was able to pick the winner, and also showed trending for Phil Taylor in particular.