When the great and good of British sport gather tomorrow to look back over the year amid the glamour of the BBC Sports Personality of the Year programme, you can be sure that women will not feature greatly.

We will be treated to a lengthy reprise of the (male) football highlights, plus the exploits of, among others, the terrifyingly fast glamour boys of Formula One and Moto GP and the muscle men with boxing gloves. In place of honour at the end will no doubt be a complete re-run of every nail-biting high and low of the England men winning the Ashes.

If we are lucky, we may see a moment or two of the England women's cricket team who also won the Ashes, and if we are very lucky, it won't be their victory parade but a bit of cricket action.

What we almost certainly won't see is Beth Tweddle in the gymnastics World Championship. She only came fourth. But that was as a big an achievement as winning the Ashes, male or female, coming as she does from a country without the gymnastic backing of, say, the Russians or the Rumanians she left trailing in her wake. The best we had done before her was 14th.

The England men's Ashes success has ensured that the red-hot favourite for the Sports Personality of the Year is a man. But surely even Andrew Flintoff's magnificent performance cannot rank above those of world record-breaker and sailor par excellence Dame Ellen MacArthur.

Flintoff and Co are also likely to take the Sports Team of the Year award. They are my second choice, but only if they share it with the England women's cricket team. However, my vote has to be for the team behind the successful London 2012 Olympic Games bid. Yes, it contains both men and women, but that's not why I'm choosing them. They have achieved something that will have a far more profound and lasting effect on sport in this country than any other team or individual for many a year and they did it against all the odds.

This week's column was written by Megi Rychlikova

Updated: 09:56 Saturday, December 10, 2005