THE difference between winning and losing in sport is often minimal, even more so at the highest level.

Ten days ago, Steve Cram told a packed Dave Ferguson Room at Beau Sejour the story of how at the Athens Olympics in 2004 the combined winning margins of Chris Hoy, Kelly Holmes and one of GB’s rowers amounted to less than half-a-second.

I can’t recall the exact figure but it was 0.something, so quick that you could not start and stop a stopwatch quicker than the fraction of a second Crammie quoted.

On Wednesday afternoon I still swear I saw Alison Merrien’s final bowl of her world final against Debbie Stavrou touch the jack, but yet it somehow glided cruelly past, the jack stayed still and our finest ever bowler had missed out on the title.

I put the near miss down to the fact that the Guernseywoman was forced to play – on national television too – in the national colours of Jersey.

Even her bowls were red and the fact that her talented opponent was wearing green and using bowls of the same colour, this proud Sarnian was sufficiently confused to lose out.

Let’s hope this fantastically talented sportswoman does not lose out again when the votes are cast next Thursday to decide the 2009 Sportingbet Sports Personality of the Year, the climax of which will be shown live on Channel TV.

Guernsey’s hopes of preventing a hat-trick of Caesarean wins lie with the bowler and young Heather Watson, who also went close this week in the big warm-up tournament for next week’s Australian Open.

I just hope that the CI voters and certainly those this side of the Russel, do not consider that Merrien losing in a world final and Watson in the quarter-finals of a grade one world standard event to the world No. 3, as a failure and a reason not to pick up the phone and register a vote.

The trouble is that we get so used to seeing the likes of Merrien and Watson winning on the international stage, there is a danger that we as islanders get a touch blasé and regard near misses as a loss of form and not as heroic failures, which they are.

Both our contenders are among the very best in the world and, for that reason, in my book, are more worthy of the Channel Island vote than the three from Jersey, all of whom are doing very nicely but if the Guernsey public do their bit will be also-rans to a Sarnian next Thursday night.