Laura Robson has successfully made it through to the final three contenders for the BBC’s Young Sports Personality of the Year award. The two other contenders who made it through were Tom Daley, Olympic diver and last year’s winner, and Paralympic double gold medallist in swimming, Eleanor Simmonds.
It’ll be tough for Laura to win when she’s up against two Olympians, but I think winning Wimbledon Junior’s was such a big thing as well… it’s so hard to call. The winner will be announced at on Sunday, December 14.
Laura Robson has made it through to the final 10 nominees for this year’s BBC Young Sports Personality of the Year Award. Proving how tough it was to get shortlisted this year is the fact there are 4 Olympians among the nominees.
A panel chaired by BBC Sport presenter John Inverdale met on Monday 10 November to decide on the shortlist of 10. They will meet again on 24 November to choose the top three from this list. These three will be invited to the live event, this year held in Liverpool Echo Arena on Sunday, 14 December at 19:00 GMT. The winner is selected by secret ballot
If Laura wins it won’t be the first time a tennis player has won the award - Andy Murray won it in 2004, and Greg Rusedski also won a Sports Personality of the Year award in 1997, Tim Henman was second that year.
Read more about the other nominees over at the BBC Young Sports Personality of the Year page.
Over the past couple of days I’ve been busy adding more pictures of Laura Robson to our gallery. All new/updated images are clearly marked and will be for a period of one week. Updated images by the way are simply images which we already had, but have now been updated with better quality, higher resolution versions.
First of all, there are about 40 new/updated images of Laura in our Wimbledon 2008 gallery, as well as a couple of updated photos of her at the Champions Dinner.
Secondly, 22 new Laura Robson pictures have been added to the Shrewsbury gallery.
Finally, our gallery for the Fortis Championships in Luxembourg has had the majority of it’s images updated, and we’ve also found a collection of pictures of Laura while she was practicing for her games - those have of course been added too.
We aim to have the largest gallery of Laura Robson pictures available on the web, but of course we can’t have every single picture available due to copyright laws. You may also like to check out this collection of pictures of Laura competing in the International Women’s Open earlier this year - we can’t host the images here for copyright reasons 
Laura won the first of what will surely be many senior singles’ titles yesterday after beating fellow British junior Samantha Vickers 6-3 6-2 in the final of a $10k event in Sunderland, England. With this title in hand Laura should move well inside the top 500 this week, so keep a look out for updated ranking lists soon!
To bring you up to speed on this small tournament which received pretty much no coverage in the news, here’s how Laura got to the final…
Seeded fifth for the tournament, Robson made everything look easy once again as she beat 16-year-old Stephanie Cornish in straight sets in her first round match, then did the same to 23-year-old Matea Mezak in the second round, winning both 6-3 6-3.
Robson was pushed to 3 sets just once in the tournament - her third round opponent Laura-Ioana Andrei of Romania gave her a better fight in the quarter-finals with Robson eventually winning the tough match 6-7 (7-9) 6-4 7-5. Laura came back stronger from this to win her semi-final 6-3 6-3 against Tara Moore, before finally finishing off the tournament with the straight sets victory over Samantha Vickers.
Great job Laura!
Link: Sunderland image gallery
