Through the years, this award was won by such now legendary athletes of Muhammad Ali, Jim Ryun, Lance Armstrong, Mario Andretti, Dennis Conner, Wayne Gretzky, Carl Lewis and Tiger Woods.

These included many types not previously seen on American television, such as hurling, rodeo, curling, jai-alai, firefighter's competitions, wrist wrestling, powerlifting, surfing, logger sports, demolition derby, slow pitch softball, barrel jumping, and badminton.

Traditional Olympic sports such as figure skating, skiing, gymnastics and track and field competitions were also regular features of the show.

Wide World of Sports was the first U.S. television program to air coverage of – among events – Wimbledon (1961), the Indianapolis 500 (highlights starting in 1961; a longer-form version in 1965), the NCAA Men's Basketball Championship (1962), the Daytona 500 (1962), the U.S.

Figure Skating Championships (1962), the first color broadcast of the Monaco Grand Prix (1967), the Little League World Series (1961), The British Open Golf Tournament (1961), the X-Games (1995) and the Grey Cup (1962).

The program's introductory sequence was accompanied by a stirring, brassy musical fanfare (composed by Charles Fox), set over a montage of sports clips and accompanying narration written by Stanley Ralph Ross and voiced by McKay: Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport... the thrill of victory... and the agony of defeat... the human drama of athletic competition...

While "the thrill of victory" had several symbols over the decades, Slovenian ski jumper Vinko Bogataj, whose dreadful misjump and crash during a competition on March 21, 1970, was featured from the early 1970s onward heard over the sentence "...and the agony of defeat."

Later in the 1990s, an additional clip was added to the "agony of defeat" sequence after Bogataj's accident: footage of a crash by Alessandro Zampedri, Roberto Guerrero and Eliseo Salazar during the 1996 Indianapolis 500 showed a car flipping up into the catch fence.

Bogataj's mishap is also commemorated in Rich Hall's book Sniglets as "agonosis", which is defined as "the syndrome of tuning in on Wide World of Sports every weekend just to watch the skier rack himself."

It, along with Nine's cricket coverage, also inspired a series of parodies, released as audio albums by Billy Birmingham, under the nom-de-plum of The Twelfth Man.

The program "El Ancho Mundo del Deporte" was aired in Monterrey Mexico in the state government owned Canal 28 from 1985 to 1991.