Were you sat in front of the TV on Sunday evening, waiting to see who was crowned BBC Sports Personality of the Year? Perhaps winner Bradley Wiggins or one of the nominees was local to you and you were willing them to be the winner. Here at Ordnance Survey we were all willing different nominees to win, but our minds inevitably turned to mapping – and we wondered where the winners and nominees came from, and whether there were hotspots around the country that produce our successful sports men and women.

So, we created a map using OS OpenSpace. We’ve taken the nominees for both BBC Sports Personality of the Year and BBC Young Sports Personality of the Year and placed a marker in the town they were born. As we’re the national mapping agency for Great Britain, where a nominee has been born outside Great Britain (and that includes Northern Ireland and the Channel Islands) we put our marker in the town in which they currently live, rather than the town where they were born. If the athlete also lives outside Great Britain, we’ll place the marker in the place they grew up.

Take a look at our map and see if there any nominees clustered in your area – perhaps it will inspire you to take up a new sport!

If you haven’t come across it before, OS OpenSpace is a free service that allows you to embed our maps, covering the whole of Great Britain, into your web applications, if they are free to consumers. OS OpenSpace uses our JavaScript application programming interface (API) and does not include any advertising in the maps.