IS there going to be a new category at this year’s BBC boy scout-like jamboree otherwise known as the tinsel-tingling Sports Personality Of The Year programme?

Now, before any groans start to gather in throats, this is not the build-up to another pop at the Beeb’s festive sports stock-in-trade gathering of jolly japes, forced laughter and grin-gurning presenters.

Surely, there HAS to be a new prize to be meted out at this year’s December 19 gathering.

And there surely can be only one recipient in the entire world of sport from the Andes to the Appalachians, from Stornoway to Sydney from Victoria Falls to Vladivostock.

Step forward Audley Harrison and get your barely exercised handies on the inaugural “Most Deluded Sportsperson Award”.

In one of the most risible decisions made in any sport, the one-time Olympic boxing gold medallist has decided he is not going to hang up his gloves when all observers and most neutrals believe he should now slide away from the game of hard knocks and even harder downfalls.

If the self-delusion gong is not an award up for grabs then there could be one for the most pointless five words in sport, and by that, I don’t mean “Bigger and better on Sky”.

Even more preposterous than that description of the 24-hour rolling rigmarole of repetitious tedium, is the announcement: “Audley Harrison to carry on boxing.” I mean, other than in the Olympiad of 2000 in Sydney where he won gold, when has he precisely started boxing?

Certainly he did not bother with the rudiments of the noble art last month when, in the most futile mis-match since Arbroath vanquished Bon Accord 36-0 in September 1885 at football, Harrison fell to a pitiful third round defeat to World Boxing Association heavyweight champion David Haye, Harrison’s former sparring partner and friend.

Remember – if you insist on tasking your brain cells with such mediocrity – this was the bout which dragged domestic boxing further into the mire.

In a shade over seven minutes in front of more than 20,000 paying customers and yet more who shelled out cash on pay-for-TV subscription, Harrison threw just one punch in anger.

That’s right, just one solitary, single, isolated, individual, lone punch when in the same time two rounds of almost any amateur contest will have produced a hundred-fold of blows.

And Harrison has the audacity to style himself the ‘A’-force. More like the Zzz-bore.

When that press statement issued across Sky Sports News’ bottom of the screen ‘breaking news’ bar, one of The Press sports-desk wordsmiths wondered was it April 1 rather than December 1?

I pondered too whether the pantomime season had already started with some sort of sick-joke dialogue.

Newshound: “Audley Harrison is to keep on boxing.”

Audience response: “Oh no, you’re not.”

If only the audience, any audience, could enforce such a plaintive plea.

Harrison indulgently went on to say that he wanted to “continue his journey in boxing” adding that the “Haye experience had many highs away from the ring”. Yeah, no doubt the £1 million-plus share of the purse he was reported to have trousered provided some sort of solace.

He also said he had a “game-plan and went into the ring to win”. Audley, if you wanted to tire out Haye to try to take advantage in any later rounds you have to actually force him into some sort of exertions. Any pretence of a rope-a-dope plan is flawed when you employ just the dope part.

To the 39-year-old’s credit, his carry-on fighting declaration did include a laudable sentiment. “We roll up our sleeves and we try again,” said Harrison defiantly.

Fine. But not boxing, Audley, not boxing. You have tried – tried the watching public’s patience to the nth degree over the past decade since returning home with gold in your gloves.

And at your age now what reflexes you may have are inexorably dulling day by day.

What’s left to you? Another crack at the wretched “Prizefighter” reality show which you won in October of last year? It’s hardly Olympic gold and it’s also mega millions of miles away from the glory of winning a world title.