The 49-year-old Sports Foundation Sportsman and Sportswoman of the Year awards — now under the organisational and sponsorship umbrella of the RJR Communications Group — are perhaps the most prized and respected of their type in Jamaican sport.

So it is then that every year the sporting fraternity awaits the event with great anticipation and ascribes considerable significance to the nominations and eventual choices.

This time around, as was the case the previous year, Mr Usain Bolt’s complete dominance of the sprints and the unprecedented excellence of his achievements in competition at the highest level meant his being named as Sportsman of the Year was never in doubt.

His Gold medals in world record times in the 200m and 100m, complemented by another Gold medal in the sprint relay at the 12th IAAF World Athletic Championships in Berlin, Germany in mid-2009 were wondrous feats, to put it mildly. That Mr Bolt was simply following on similar achievements at the Beijing Olympics of 2008 is mind-boggling.

The Sportswoman of the Year Award to the gracious and personable sprint hurdler Mrs Brigitte Foster-Hylton was far less straightforward. Mrs Foster-Hylton was one of three female individual Gold medal winners for Jamaica in Berlin — the others being the 400m hurdler Miss Melaine Walker and the 100m specialist Miss Shelly Ann Fraser. For the record, both Miss Walker and Miss Fraser also won individual Gold medals in Beijing.

To the casual eye, both appeared to have trumped Mrs Foster-Hylton by winning their individual World Champs Gold Medals last year in national record times. But for those of us looking on from a distance, Miss Fraser — who only last Friday was named the JAAA’s Female Athlete of the Year — appeared to be ahead of all other female athletes for 2009, since, in addition to her individual World Champs Gold medal, she was part of the team that won the sprint relay Gold.

Hence, the surprise being expressed by many in track and field and wider sporting circles yesterday at the decision of the selection panel chaired by the esteemed Mr Mike Fennell to choose Mrs Foster-Hylton. The panel, we are sure, would have made their decision after careful consideration of all the facts while bearing in mind objective criteria.

This newspaper believes it would be useful and appropriate for the panel to share their reasons with the rest of us.

On another note, we are pleased that Mrs Foster-Hylton and Mr Bolt have apologised for arriving late for Thursday night’s awards ceremony. “We had training and we got held in traffic and we apologise for that… It wasn’t anything intentional,” Mrs Foster-Hylton was quoted by the Observer as saying.

We trust that others who also turned up late will also see fit to say sorry. Even without the ugly rumours which had circulated that some athletes were planning to boycott the prestigious event, such tardiness is unprofessional at best.