Summer Edition 2017

INTERVIEW
Clare Balding is just as you
would expect her to be:
warm, articulate, intelligent,
inspiring. Most reassuring,
though, is how down to
earth the broadcaster and
best-selling author remains
despite the accolades that
have been heaped upon her: OBE, BAFTA Special
Award, Royal Television Society’s Presenter of
the Year Award, Racing
Journalist of the Year, to
name but a few. “I don’t need
freshly born kittens and lilies.
I don’t even need a dressing
room. I go and change in the
loo if needs be.”
It is this lack of
entitlement, along with her
unerring professionalism,
that has won over the hearts
of pretty much the entire
nation and made her the go-to presenter for so many
of the sporting calendar’s biggest events.
When we meet she has just finished fronting
Crufts, is in the middle of filming a Channel 4
documentary, When Football Banned Women, which
tells the story of the globally feted Dick Kerr ladies
and explains how the 50-year ban (1921-1971) came
about. Then she’s onto the Boat Race, the America’s
Cup (“something totally new for me to learn”),
Wimbledon, swiftly followed by the European
Women’s Football Championships in Holland,
which she is also presenting for the first time. In
amongst all this, she has her ongoing Radio 4 series,
Ramblings, and is also in the throes of writing her
second novel for children, a sequel to her hugely
popular witty debut, The Racehorse Who Wouldn’t
Gallop. Due out in October, it has, she tips us off, a
“certain Shergar theme to it”.
“THINK LESS
ABOUT WHAT
OTHER PEOPLE
THINK AND MORE
ABOUT WHO YOU
WANT TO BE”
It’s exhausting just thinking about her schedule.
And that’s not all of her commitments by any means,
so just imagine when it’s an Olympic year. How on
earth does she do it?
“There’s a lot of other stuff that I don’t do. My
sister-in-law will rustle up dinner for 20 people
without blinking – that would give me a heart attack.
I don’t have kids. Alice [Arnold, her wife] plans our
holidays. I’m pretty focused on what I do.” Focused,
or a workaholic, perhaps? “Yes, it is a danger, ” she
admits. “But I recognise it and pull back from it.”
The buzz of live coverage is hard to pass up, she
admits: “I do love the energy and performance of
live TV and radio, bringing a sporting event to life…
trying to make people care about a race they’ve never
watched before and they don’t know who half the
swimmers, cyclists or whoever are.”
As the daughter of former
racehorse trainer Ian Balding,
sport was in her blood. “The
whole family was into it and it
was on TV all the time.” She
did endless competitive riding
in the holidays and played a lot
of lacrosse at Downe House,
where she was head girl. Sport
is, she insists, hugely important
to schoolchildren’s confidence.
“When you’re really
struggling and feeling that you’re failing at
something, it’s really good for showing you how to
pick yourself up – not just how to succeed, but how
to work in a team, how to react when someone else
wins, how to get fit, to recover.”
It is also, she says, a valuable reminder that life’s
“not all about being size zero and stick thin”. It’s a
theme she deals with in The Racehorse Who Wouldn’t
Gallop, which tells the heartwarming story of a
horse-mad 10-year-old girl, Charlie Bass, who has
big thighs and even bigger dreams.
SUMMER 17 ★ schoolnotices.co.uk 13