Straight from the horse’s mouth!
The homophobia she faced from her own grandmother. Her delight at getting married. And the book she hopes will help girls with ‘thunder thighs’. Broadcaster and writer Clare Balding tells her REAL story...
KICK her in the head!’ Incredible as it sounds, that’s what the calmest woman on telly Clare Balding found herself yelling at the screen during the Olympics, as she secretly lost her cool off air. ‘Everyone else has got to have been saying that too! You’re shouting, “Go on! Kick her!’’’ Balding was urging the British fighter Bianca Walkden to greater feats of violence in the taekwondo and felt ‘a bit wrong’ about it afterwards – but it’s a wonderful surprise to hear that even the normally unflappable presenter can’t help getting caught up in the action sometimes. She was back on air within moments, as if nothing had happened. ‘I very rarely get stressed because it’s never about me,’ she says. ‘It’s always about the athletes.’
Balding is the head girl who has always done her homework, the trusted friend who guides us through the Grand National, the Boat Race or Crufts and knows the right thing to say every time, whether she’s hosting a royal birthday party on the Mall or talking about life and death on her BBC Radio 2 faith and spirituality show Good Morning Sunday.
For the next few weeks she will be back in Rio hosting the Paralympics for Channel 4 with absolute focus. ‘I won’t look at anything that isn’t relevant to what I’m doing. It’s like taking an exam every day in your favourite subject. I love that. I do like concentrating.’
Today, though, we are going to find out what rattles Balding, in a revealing and sometimes tricky chat about everything from the secret trials of Rio – where her hotel was unfinished and half the crew got sick – to her new book for children and her marriage to Alice Arnold, the former BBC Radio 4 presenter who became her wife last year.
‘I feel how much attitudes have changed and it’s wonderful. I’m thrilled,’ she says. ‘You’re still going to get people who feel very insecure about gay people being happy and they’re going to make a fuss but hey, that’s their problem I think and not mine.’
Balding’s grandmother found out she was a lesbian after seeing a photograph of her together with Arnold in a newspaper and said to her face that she thought it was ‘disgusting’. They didn’t speak for six months after that, so have they now been reconciled?
‘Well, she’s not with us any more. She died before we got married. She wouldn’t ever have been particularly happy about it. She talked to me but essentially I would send the dog in there first, ’cos she loved the dog. He’s still around. She didn’t really talk, did she?’
Arnold, who is sitting close by, says quietly: ‘Not really.’
Archie the Tibetan terrier is not with them today but this is still an unusual gathering in the cafe next to the London photographic studio where Balding has just been posing with a fine-looking horse called Duarte.
Most stars prefer to be interviewed alone but Balding’s entourage sits with us, unnervingly close. Arnold sits at my elbow, Balding’s personal manager is opposite, his assistant next to him and the publicist from the publishing company for her new book is also with us. It’s like a dysfunctional dinner party in which only two of the guests talk and the rest listen and wait – as it will turn out – to jump in and interrupt if they don’t like a question.
Balding comes across as far more confident than her friends – brighteyed and relaxed in jeans and a white cotton shirt, with her blonde quiff as immaculate as ever. The voice is posh but warm and clear, just right for not frightening the horses. Picking at chicken teriyaki, pitta bread and hummus, she talks about other people’s reactions to her marriage.
‘One of the ways of breaking down any culture of shame is just to go about your normal life the way you would with your partner. So you don’t ever hide anything but equally you don’t suddenly ham it up. Well, we don’t because we’re very rarely going to walk down a red carpet together, just because we wouldn’t, would we?’
Arnold says no. They have to put up with a lot of scrutiny, though. When viewers noticed that Balding wasn’t wearing her wedding ring in Rio, for example, her wife tweeted that it was okay, she was keeping it safe at home in London.
The change in the law introduced by former British prime minister David Cameron – who named Balding when he was asked for a ‘gay hero’ – has helped, she says.
‘If you can say, “I am married” and nobody can contradict you, nobody can put it in inverted commas, nobody can say it’s not the same, then that’s a massive step forward.’
She does still get abuse on social media – some nasty and unfair comments about her looks and some outright homophobia – but the support is far greater.
‘It’s amazing how many letters and emails we get from people who say things like, “My dad didn’t talk to me for 20 years and now he does.” Somebody wrote and said I was on the television doing the racing and her dad said, “I like that Clare Balding, she’s like you, isn’t she?” The girl said, “Well, I’m not a sports presenter.” And he said, “No, you know… and that’s all right.” That was it, the first conversation they had about it, ever.
‘You think, “Well, that’s good. Why give the abuse a moment’s thought when there’s actually a lot of good that is being done and a lot of confidence that people are gaining?”’
She hopes to give a similar confidence boost to young women with her first book for children, The Racehorse Who Wouldn’t Gallop, featuring a girl called Charlie who gets teased about her ‘thunder thighs’ but then finds they save the day.
It’s a funny and heart-warming story – ‘all my own work’ – about a family on their uppers and a horse who will only gallop if he’s chasing his best friend, a pony. Charlie works out a daring way to make that happen in the derby, which requires all her strength.
‘A lot of what Charlie finds out about is confidence,’ says Balding, who wants to help young women celebrate their bodies for what they are rather than feeling pressured to be someone else’s idea of perfect. ‘She becomes confident because what she saw as her greatest failing – her thunder thighs – ends up being the thing she needs most of all. She’s gutsy and inventive. I like her, so she’ll have more adventures.’
Female presenters face a much greater pressure to glam up and stay thin, so I have to ask Balding about her remarkable physical transformation in recent years. She has lost a lot of weight since being given the all-clear for thyroid cancer, so is that because her TV bosses told her to do so?
‘I lost weight three years ago because I had a bet with my mother,’ she says. ‘They never said I needed to. And actually if you look at me in London 2012, I am much bigger than I am now.
How did she do it? ‘There’s an app you can get on your phone called My Fitness Pal – it’s free. And I would put in all the calories of everything I was eating and all the exercise I took and if I had 100 calories left over at the end of the day I knew I could have a little mini-pack of Maltesers, which was very exciting.’
The weight loss makes it easier to find clothes, about which she is careful. ‘As long as people are not concentrating on what I look like then I am winning. I deliberately wear things that don’t draw attention to myself.’
The adventures of Charlie in The Racehorse Who Wouldn’t Gallop are loosely based on her childhood in stables in southern England as the daughter of Ian Balding, who trained winning horses for the queen – who would sometimes turn up to see the horses gallop and have breakfast with the family afterwards.
‘It only becomes weird later because people think it’s weird. It didn’t feel odd at the time because it just happened. If you accept something as normal, that’s just the way it is – apart from knowing I had to wear clean breeches or a clean shirt, which I usually forgot to do.’
Balding has never wanted children of her own but wrote the book after making up stories for her five-yearold niece Flora and two nephews. Her uncle Toby has trained winners in the Grand National and the Gold Cup. ‘My nephew Johnno, when he first met the queen, said: “Where’s your crown?” A reasonable question if you’ve only ever seen pictures of kings and queens with crowns on.’
Young Charlie succeeds by making everyone around her feel involved in what she’s doing, which is exactly what Balding does on
‘Some people still make a fuss about gay people. That’s their problem’ ‘Having breakfast with the queen didn’t feel odd. It just happened’
screen. She never seems to panic, and says that calm comes from having grown up with horses.
‘I think it gives you a sense of responsibility at a pretty young age and a sense of unconditional love. Unless they hate you, in which case it is unconditional hate, but that’s quite rare!’
She was miserable at first at the £10,000-a-term boarding school, where other notable pupils have included comedian Miranda Hart, Pippa Middleton and, briefly, her sister the duchess of Cambridge.
‘I got in trouble at school because I would always rather have been with the dogs and the horses than with people. I’m better with people now.’
She even got caught for shoplifting in an attempt to fit in with the other pupils, so how on earth did she end up as head girl? ‘I had a very forgiving headmistress who believed I could turn things around. You need adults in your life who are prepared to forgive what you did when you were a teenager.’
Balding was an accomplished amateur jockey, the best female racer in Britain in 1990, by which time she was on her way to study English at university and become president of the Cambridge Union. After that she joined the BBC as a trainee. Horses were her speciality, so she began presenting at Royal Ascot and became the face of the BBC’s racing coverage, before going on to other sports such as rugby league and occasions like Crufts.
Then came London 2012, which turned her into a household name. ‘Clare’s Coverage Is Olympic Gold,’ said one headline and she won a special Bafta for it. People started calling her a national treasure. By the following year her income had doubled to £500,000, according to company accounts. There is pressure now on the BBC to name all the stars it pays more than £450,000 a year, but she is adamant that does not apply to her.
‘I don’t think you’ll find me on the BBC list. I wrote two best-selling books [her two autobiographies], that’s where the bulk of my earnings came from. I’d be very interested to see the list of top 10 or top 50 earners to see how many women are on it, because that will be the big reveal. I’d like to think there would be 10 women in the top 20 but.… there might be one. I can think of one. We’ll never crack it until women are paid equally and women’s sport gets as much coverage as men’s.’
She’s at the top of her game now but when Balding flew out to Rio for the first time this summer she was far more anxious than you might expect.
‘I knew it would be difficult to follow London 2012. I was very nervous about that. Also, it was my first time being the prime-time presenter for a summer Games, so it was a big deal. I didn’t want to mess it up.’
There were all sorts of hidden challenges to working in Brazil. The hotel was not so great. ‘Very unglamorous. DIY apartments. They did give us breakfast but it was a complex that wasn’t really finished, so there weren’t any shops around. A lot of colleagues got ill. Not necessarily those in front of the camera but the producers. I was either lucky or I ate better.
‘I’m better now at surviving and making sure I don’t have any days in the middle where I dip and get grumpy or difficult. You learn to train yourself. You have to work out how to get through 16 days of probably 12 hours a day in the office or on air, with more on top of that in terms of prepping.’
That’s important because she has a terrific short-term memory and her technique is to ignore everything else – including breaking news stories at home and even emails from family – and cram hard each morning and night on the next sports coming her way.
She worked hard not to be distracted. ‘Other than talking to Alice a couple of times a day, I didn’t communicate with anyone else [outside the team] during the Olympics.’
Her highlight was the day Team GB won gold in women’s hockey and veteran rider Nick Skelton did the same in the showjumping. ‘I’ve known Nick a long time. It’s a ridiculous thing to still be going 36 years after your first Olympics and win gold, isn’t it?’
She is utterly unrepentant about backing the British competitors heart and soul. ‘If you don’t care, then you pay a greater price than if you do care. No boss has ever said to me, “You’re too biased.” I mean, I made sure I mugged up on the Netherlands team as well.’
Of course she did. She’s Clare Balding. But isn’t the BBC biased towards British competitors? ‘Have you watched NBC’s coverage? NBC wouldn’t show a gold medal if a person from their country didn’t win it. We don’t do that. We do it properly.’
Not all the time. She was broadcasting herself, so didn’t see the way presenters John Inverdale and Steve Redgrave competed with each other for airtime like a couple of rutting stags but she does have a view on ‘Teagate’.
The Olympic cycling champion-turned-commentator Chris Boardman was branded ‘disgusting’ and a sexist online for what he said when Laura Trott embraced her fiancé Jason Kenny after his sixth gold: ‘He’s looking at her going, “What’s for tea?”’
Balding bristles when she is asked about this but defends him. ‘Chris Boardman got a bit of stick, which was really unnecessary and unfortunate because he could just as easily have said, “What’s on telly tonight?” That’s what he meant.
‘You’re live on television for five or six hours, you’re going to say something wrong. I’m sure I did say things wrong and got lucky and didn’t get picked up on it. I don’t think there is ever an intent to offend, so it is just a mistake.’
Naturally enough, I ask if she has ever messed up on camera? ‘Oh, plenty of times.’ Will she give me an example? ‘No, don’t!’ says her wife, suddenly alarmed.
‘I’m not going to, don’t worry,’ says Balding, so I never find out if it was the time she told the 2009 Grand National winner Liam Treadwell he could afford to get his teeth fixed now. He was embarrassed (having poor teeth because of a medical condition), his mother said it was mean and Balding apologised, by text.
Arnold may think I am trying to catch her partner out but the point is that any mistake by Balding is a rarity.
‘Luckily, I recover. And I do think sometimes life is about survival. It’s not about winning awards. It’s not about glory. It’s just sometimes about getting through, moving on. As long as you get offered another job, you’ve got a chance to put it right.’
Now she’s in Rio again for the Paralympics, so what has she learned from being around so many extraordinary human beings? The answer is surprising.
‘If you try hard enough, there is something in all of us that is the equivalent to what an Olympic athlete has. We may not all be Michael Phelps but the Brownlee brothers are just normal human beings. So is Andy Murray. So is Justin Rose. They haven’t got super-powers. They all start off the same as us; it’s just that somewhere along the way we lost the drive or never had it. They have a level of commitment that borders on obsession.
‘The Olympians have a way of examining their own brain and saying. “What am I capable of? Where am I not pushing myself? Where am I not making the most of what I’ve got?”’
And few of us have done that better over the years than Clare Balding. She may feel she needs an entourage today for moral support, but if anyone deserves an individual gold medal, it is her.
The Racehorse Who Wouldn’t Gallop by Clare Balding is published on September 22 by Puffin, €14.50.
‘I’m better now at making sure I don’t have days where I get grumpy’