I’m making the most of life – on my own terms
Clare Balding tells ABI JACKSON why she doesn’t feel she has to prove herself now
MOST of us had a realisation or two during the pandemic. One of Clare Balding’s was that she doesn’t “need to be on television.”
Not that she doesn’t love her jobs presenting major sporting events for the BBC, Channel 4 and BT Sport. But for Clare, it’s all about the storytelling and being at the heart of it – the fact there are cameras is by the by.
“I think last year was a fantastic opportunity for me to have a sabbatical from television, which effectively I did, because all the events I was meant to work on got cancelled. And in my head, it triggered something, which was I really don’t need to be on television to have any sort of self-validation,” she explains.
“If I’m doing it, it’s because I love it and I love the event – it’s not about me being on television. It’s about me working on the Olympics or working on Wimbledon and getting an opportunity to go, ‘Look at this player Emma Raducanu, she’s amazing!’ I see it as a storyteller’s role on telly, and that I just happen to be seen, unfortunately.”
It’s why she finds switching gears between broadcasting, podcasting and writing a lot simpler than it might sound.
Hampshire-born Clare – whose sporting career began with an early stint as an amateur jockey, before starting as a BBC trainee and working her way up to become one of the country’s most highprofile female sports presenters – already has eight books out, with more on the way.
These include her bestselling autobiography My Animals And Other Family and – her latest – Fall Off, Get Back On, Keep Going.
“All through the Paralympics, I’m trying to get [the athletes] to share their story. That’s what I love about it. So the way I work on television or radio, it’s pretty much the way I work on a book, really – I love hearing different voices, and I love being able to make people interested.”
Structure is a vital part of the writing process too for Clare, whose approach is to “block out days in the diary”. After coffee in the morning (“I love my coffee”) she’ll sit down and start, or go for a walk if she’s “struggling with creativity”.
She says: “If I sit and it comes, I’ll write. If it doesn’t come, I’ll walk, and then I’ll come back and write.”
It clearly works: she completed two books in the pandemic and will soon be cracking on with another.
First though, she’ll be busy reading in her new role as celebrity judge on the Kindle Storyteller Awards. There’s a £20,000› prize up for grabs, but Balding is also excited by the prospect of highlighting Kindle as an avenue for self-publishing and what that means in terms of getting “different voices” out there.
“I talk to a lot of people who are writing stories, and I know from my own [writing], the challenge is to get a publisher interested in the story, but quite often it’s difficult to do that by just giving them an outline.
“With Kindle Direct Publishing, that battle is won,
I want to get the most out of life – I want to have new experiences Clare’s outlook at 50
you’ve got it, and then people can read the whole story. What prizes like this do is really animate the market, they can encourage people to be brave.
“I really genuinely like reading other people’s work, and working with new talent,” she adds. “It gives me fuel and makes me think more adventurously.”
What “gives her fuel” is another thing that has evolved for Clare as life’s gone on. In her autobiography, she wrote of early struggles as a young woman whose body was larger than the ‘norm’ in the very weight-focused world of horse racing. And while Clare is arguably at the top of her game, she is a woman, in a same-sex marriage, in sports - a world rooted in sexism and which, until very recently, had no acknowledgment of its LGBTQ members.
A lot of her energy has gone into championing and levelling the playing field for women’s sports. And she has clear criteria when it comes to choosing what project to do next.
She says: “I’m very conscious of trying to get the most out of life, generally. I want to have new experiences, fresh experiences, I want to be challenged.
“I’m not trying to prove anything. I think definitely in my 20s and 30s, you feel like you’re scrambling up a mountain.
“You are really, really driven by this deep desire to prove either other people wrong, or prove to yourself that you can do this.
“And then you come to a point where you think, OK - it’s not an attitude of ‘I’ve got there’ in any sense - it’s more a sense of, ‘I’m 50 now, what do I want?”’
But it’s not just age that’s shifted her perspective.
“I wasn’t very well in 2009 [she had thyroid cancer] and that was a big wake-up. I did think, ‘Gosh, I really do need to make sure I make the most of this’. Just that, just keep doing new things. That was a bit of a gear-changer.”
The Kindle Storyteller Award will be announced later this year. Visit amazon.co.uk/storyteller