EVEN for a non-Olympic year, 2015 has been a vintage one for sport, provided you are not an England rugby supporter, that is. OK. That's the Schadenfreude out of the way.

Eight of the 12 nominated contenders for this year's BBC Sports Personality of the Year won individual world titles. Another - Andy Murray - was the lynchpin of the quartet which won what is effectively a global team title.

Tyson Fury's world heavyweight upset, ending Wladimir Klitschko's 11-year unbeaten run, is so recent that he might have been in the frame a week tomorrow. Proximity of sporting success to the actual awards ceremony can significantly influence the vote. Hence, for example, Roger Bannister being upstaged by his pace-maker in 1954, inaugural year of the BBC award. Bannister had been first to break four minutes for the mile in May, but it was Chris Chataway who lifted the trophy. He beat the Soviet, Vladimir Kuts, breaking the world 5000m record live on TV, in mid-October.

Given the furore over Fury's politically incorrect remarks, he will surely be punished by loss of public votes, yet the bookies still have him fourth favourite, at 25-1.

The credentials of Andy Murray and Lewis Hamilton, with major successes fresh in the mind, will help in their battle for public votes.

Given his role in Britain's Davis Cup success, the best price you can get about the Scot is 7-10. Three wins in the final (and 11 during the 2015 campaign) brought the cup to the UK for the first time in 79 years.

The bookies seldom get it wrong, but I have a few observations:

1) I admire inspirational Andy to bits, but "Personality"?

2) The Davis Cup can be won annually, and there are four Grand Slam events annually. The fact that this was Britain's first Cup victory for so long is more a commentary on how useless we have been at tennis, than anything else.

3) Murray has many chances to shine. Olympic Games happen once in four years, and World athletics championships every two.

4) The best with which Murray had to contend against Belgium was the world No.16. Most contenders for the BBC title had to beat their closest world-ranked rivals. Despite having roared myself hoarse for Murray over that final, I would have been even more impressed had he won a Grand Slam final against Novak Djokovic who beat him in Murray's only Grand Slam final this year.

Murray is nominated for the eleventh time in 12 years. My money is on him to win, with the Team of the Year title looking a cert to go to the Davis Cup squad.

Third favourite is Kevin Sinfield at 10-1. The former England rugby league captain helped Leeds Rhinos to the treble. After 19 years in League, becoming only the fourth player to top 4000 points, he has switched to Union, wooed to Yorkshire Carnegie by Scottish Lions icon Sir Ian McGeechan. No league player has ever featured in the BBC top three.

Hamilton passed Ayrton Senna's record of 41 career wins, claiming the third F1 title of his career, matching Scotland's Jackie Stewart. Yet despite the superlatives, Hamilton won with three races to go, so it was hardly a classic championship.

Perhaps it's just me, but this is a sport more restricted than any other, and elitist beyond measure. Not genuinely pan-global, nor open to all, like the sports of every other short-listed candidate.

Petrolheads lobby like few other sports fans, however, so Hamilton may not be far away, despite odds of 40-1 leaving him fifth, behind Fury. And despite a second Tour de France victory in three years, Chris Froome is 100-1 in sixth place.

Athletics followers have a choice of three world champions: Jessica Ennis-Hill, Mo Farah, and Greg Rutherford. No doubt this will dilute the vote for all three.

Ennis-Hill is second favourite, at 11-4, behind the odds-on Murray.

It truly was the "mother of all comebacks" when she claimed her second World heptathlon title in Beijing, 13 months after the birth of a son. It was her first major championship since the Olympics. The seven-event discipline identifies the world's greatest all-round female athlete who now knows she was denied a third World title by a Russian drug cheat.

She is one of several contenders to have achieved feats arguably harder than that of Murray, though one would have to note her speciality is in a far narrower field.

Farah on the other hand, up against a depth of quality unlike any other, nevertheless became first to do the double of two endurance titles at successive World Championships and the intervening Olympics. Not even Ethiopian icons Haile Gebrselassie or Kenenisa Bekele managed that. When Mo took his third successive 5000m World gold in Beijing in August it completed a haul of seven successive global track titles.

Brendan Foster, 1974, was the last distance runner to win the BBC award, with markedly more modest credentials. To me, Farah has delivered the sporting feat of 2015, but at 150-1, in seventh place, the bookies clearly don't agree.

When Rutherford won World long jump gold he completed a Grand Slam perhaps tougher even than winning all four on the tennis circuit. He now holds World, Olympic, European, and Commonwealth crowns simultaneously. The only other Brits to do so are Daley Thompson (decathlon), Linford Christie (100m), Sally Gunnell (400m hurdles), and Jonathan Edwards (triple jump).

Adam Peaty - who would scream in terror when put in his bath as a baby - was the first man to complete the 50m and 100m breaststroke double at the World Swimming Championships, then helped Britain to gold in the mixed 4x100m medley relay in world record time. He would be the first swimmer to win since Anita Lonsbrough (1962), and the first man to do so since Aberdeen's Ian Black (1958), but the bookies rate him a 500-1 outsider – same as Max Whitlock, Lizzie Armitstead, and Lucy Bronze, despite all being trail-blazers.

Whitlock became the first Brit to win gymnastic World gold when he claimed the pommel horse title in Glasgow. No gymnast has ever won the BBC title.

Armitstead took the World road race title and World Cup series for the second time, and Bronze, though right back, scored twice for the England Women's World Cup football team which finished third in Canada. This is the highest World Cup placing by England since their men won in 1966, yet Bronze is the first female footballer to make the shortlist.

Whoever your personal choice, we should savour a golden age for British sport.