Walking Home

by Clare Balding

  My father always said that the best way of getting fit to ride in a race was by riding in a race. The same is true of Olympic broadcasting – the best way of preparing for one is to cover one. You clock up the hours, work out what you need to know, who to turn to for help, and how to negotiate the infernal transport systems.

  My first Olympics was in Atlanta in 1996. Everyone told me that I had missed the best one, in Barcelona, and that Atlanta was awful, but for me it was the most exciting thing ever. I reported for radio on the eventing, showjumping, modern pentathlon and, weirdly, mountain biking, because it came through the Horse Park in Conyers where all the equestrian events were held. I interviewed Bo Derek because she was watching the showjumping. My ISDN kit melted in the sun.

  BBC Radio 5 Live had started in 1994 and I had been taken on as a trainee sports reporter. My brief was to cover every shift and every sport. They tried to keep me away from racing, because my boss, Bob Shennan, wanted me to expand my knowledge and take me into areas where I wasn’t dependent on people and facts that I already knew. I presented football, cricket and rugby union, wrote and read sports bulletins every half-hour for 5 Live and occasionally for Radio 4. For a while, I presented the sport on Chris Evans’s breakfast show on Radio 1. This made me, in my brother’s eyes, ‘cool’.

  I’d moved out of Kingsclere to a flat in West London, which I shared with Char, a friend from school. Finally, I was growing up – or at least growing away. In 1996 I did a screen test for the BBC and got a few days working as a reporter on the racing coverage with Julian Wilson.

  That same year, a new racing channel started on satellite TV, and they offered me a job as the main presenter. The salary they proposed was three times what I was earning at 5 Live. I turned it down.

  ‘You’re making the biggest mistake of your life,’ said their controller.

  ‘But you can’t send me to the Olympics,’ I tried to explain. ‘And I really want to go to the Olympics.’

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘We’ll make a star of someone else and, mark my words, you’ll regret it.’

  I can’t say I ever have.

  The BBC had been stealthily planning ahead for London 2012, without quite telling me those plans. In 2009 I’d quietly been sent to cover a swimming event, and after that I’d done world short-course championships, European championships and world championships; at the Commonwealth Games in Delhi I presented the swimming with Mark Foster and Ian Thorpe. I was very happy to be presenting all this swimming, but I can’t pretend that I’d worked out why I was. The answer became clear in London.

  In America and Australia, swimming had always been box office. Mark Spitz winning seven gold medals in Munich or Michael Phelps winning eight in Beijing were the headline stories. In the pool in London, Phelps would bow out of international competition by going for the all-time-record medal haul. And Britain had a host of swimmers who might actually win something, including Becky Adlington, who was defending her titles in the 400 and 800 metres.

  I got to know the swimmers and mugged up as best I could, but I was still nervous about London. I could cover the equestrian sports with my eyes shut, and I knew all the people. This was different. I was being thrown in at the deep end with no life jacket.

  So I came up with a plan. First I would make sure that no one could fault me for knowledge. I would do my homework, read around the subject, take notes in a hardback A4 book so I couldn’t lose it, and I would ask questions. Lots of them.

  The BBC swimming team is full of experts – Adrian Moorhouse is an Olympic gold medallist and four-times European champion, Andy Jamieson is an Olympic bronze medallist and European champion, Sharron Davies is an Olympic silver medallist and double Commonwealth champion and Mark, lovely Mark, is a six-times world champion and world record holder. They know their stuff. We were also helped by a brilliant researcher, Jonathan, who gave us start lists with added information in a code that I gradually deciphered.

  I decided that it wasn’t my job to know more than they did. Instead I should try to know different things about the swimmers and I should ask questions that would make swimming come alive for people at home.

  Swimming is a strange sport because it gives the competitors no scope for personality. They walk out of the changing room in a dressing gown, they have a hat and goggles on, sometimes headphones as well, then they dive into a pool, swim up and down and get out again. There are no team tactics, no chat, no scope for doing anything different or playing to the crowd. It is a very basic sport in that way, and the characters can only live large outside the pool.

  I knew I had to make people care about the competitors, otherwise it would be just a bunch of people swimming up and down lanes. In that sense, it was like horse racing, which is not an easy sell. If you haven’t had a bet, why would you care about a bunch of horses running round and round in circles? And how do you tell one jockey from another when they’re all wearing helmets and goggles?

  For me, 2012 had already been a busy year, with the usual regulars of Cheltenham, Aintree, Epsom, Royal Ascot, Challenge Cup rugby league, Wimbledon, the Boat Race, the Open Golf, Crufts, Trooping the Colour – I’ve probably forgotten something, but you get the picture. By the time I arrived at the International Broadcast Centre, four days before the opening ceremony, I was terrified that I just didn’t know what I needed to know about the Olympics. I would be caught out, exposed as a fraud. I would let the BBC down, let Britain down, let myself down.

  With fear looming large in my mind, I decided something had to give: sleep. We had live coverage of morning sessions from 9 a.m. and evening sessions until 10 p.m. There was a gap between them when, in theory, I could have a nap, but that meant going back to a very average hotel four stops east of Stratford. More bother than it was worth.

  So I stayed sat in the make-up room by the studio, which was the only place that had a sofa, a TV, a kettle and a pile of newspapers, watched the other events and read up for the evening races. That gave me time for another four hours’ homework every day. Bingo.

  The days passed, the notes grew, and I could find the stories to bring the swimming alive. I had my A4 book, my start sheets from Jonathan and my highlighter pens on a glass table in front of me. On screen, it looked like a bit of a mess, but I needed it all and I was damned if I was going to sacrifice substance for style. I had been given a GB Team stuffed toy called Pride the Lion, so Mark and I put a pair of his goggles on it and taped him to the wall behind us.

  Mark got access to the Olympic family lounge so we could pilfer coffee and cake in the mornings, when no one was in there. I worked out that I could get an extra hour in bed if I reported in for duty at 8 a.m., then quickly did my own make-up before appearing on air at 8.45. The light wasn’t great in the ladies’ loo at the Aquatics Centre, and ticket holders were surprised to see me peering into the mirror, applying my mascara. But it did the job.

  As it happens, British success in the pool was limited. There were more British finalists than ever before, but only two managed to win medals – Michael Jamieson with a silver in the 200 metres breaststroke, and Becky Adlington with two bronzes in the 400 metres and the 800 metres. So the swimming coverage wasn’t about British victories. It had to be broader.

  The day that everyone remembers is Tuesday 31 July. The men’s 200 metres butterfly. Michael Phelps’s signature event, the race he’d dominated for ten years. He was trying to become the first swimmer to win gold in the same race three Olympics in a row, and also to equal the record of eighteen medals. It was all about Phelps. Alongside him in lane five was a 20-year-old South African wearing a bright-green hat and goggles that made him seem like Kermit from The Muppets. He had been to a Youth Olympics but never a fully fledged Games, and Michael Phelps was his hero. He was called Chad Le Clos.

  Though Le Clos got a fast start, by the halfway point Phelps was leading and gunning for his fifteenth gold medal. But the rest of the field would not go away. Butterfly is all about timing (so Mark tells me) and Phelp
s wasn’t quite on it. His last stroke fell short of the end of the pool and, instead of taking another half-stroke and crashing into the timing pads with force, he glided. Le Clos pounced and touched the wall five hundredths of a second ahead.

  It was a massive upset. The cameras focused on Phelps as he looked up at the scoreboard, and then his mother, who was ever present in the stands. I love a parental reaction. It brings home the ordinariness of the extraordinary athletes and, if the parents speak well, they will always say more about the champion than he or she can say about themselves. In Sydney, I was in the crowds with Steve Redgrave’s wife, Anne, his kids and his parents as he won his fifth gold medal. We had snuck a camera into the family stand and the reaction we got became part of the archive.

  So there was Michael Phelps’s mum trying to look brave, but to her left and a little higher in the stands there was a right racket going on. There was a large man with a flushed face and a goatee beard waving a South African flag and screaming at the pool. He was going berserk.

  As the medals ceremony took place right below us, the excited man moved closer to our presentation position. I said to Mark, ‘That’s got to be Le Clos’s father. Go and get him!’

  Having chatted every day to our security gateman, I was fairly confident he would let the man through to our presentation position without the right accreditation.

  Sometimes in life you just get lucky – and sometimes you can shift the luck your way by making sure everyone understands the sense of urgency. I said excitedly on talkback to the production team, ‘You have to stay with us. Mark’s got Chad’s dad, and this is going to be brilliant.’

  At that point, Mark didn’t actually have Chad’s dad, but I knew how charming he could be and I trusted him to pull it off. As always, we were tight for time, but I wanted them to stay with us rather than shooting off to another sport. We showed a shot of the man, the South African flag now draped around his shoulders, then Mark was in shot, too, talking to him. So I said, on air, ‘Mark’s asking him to come and talk to us, so keep watching – anything could happen.’

  I could hear the editor cursing in my ear. They couldn’t leave the pool now.

  And so Bert Le Clos, Chad’s dad, arrived at the BBC’s presentation point above the pool and gave one of the most memorable interviews on live television.

  ‘This is unbelievable! Look at my boy – look at him. He’s bootiful. He’s the most down-to-earth, beautiful boy you will ever meet. Look at him! He’s crying, like me.’

  He blew him kisses and said: ‘I love you!’

  The words ‘unbelievable’ and ‘bootiful’ were repeated a few more times, but it’s not the words so much as the emotion that you remember. Here was a father just brimming over with joy that his son had achieved something so unexpected. He knew how much training had gone into this moment, how much his son had given of his teenage years to swimming up and down a pool, and he shared that with us. His love was contagious, and there can’t have been a person watching who didn’t smile.

  Down below us, Michael Phelps was guiding Chad through the protocol of showing your medal to the crowd. He put an arm around the man who had toppled him and made sure he enjoyed the moment. I admired Phelps as much for that as for the gold medal he won in the 4 × 200 freestyle relay later that evening, which took him to the outright record.

  What also made the interview with Bert so special was his humour and lack of self-awareness. He didn’t perform for the cameras. When he saw himself on screen, he looked appalled, patted his tummy and said, ‘Argh, don’t show me, I am fat. Show my boy. There he is. Isn’t he bootiful? Unbelievable. Unbelievable.’

  After about two minutes, he said, ‘Are we live?’

  When it’s going well on air you need say very little. Just keep smiling, ask the odd question and hold the microphone. Bert was a gift.

  A couple of evenings later, I bumped into him at Westfield Shopping Centre, where we went after the evening session for supper. He was still draped in the South African flag and clearly loving his new-found fame.

  ‘Clare, my darling!’ Bert hollered. ‘We are famous! We have gone viral, you and me.’

  13

  London stretched out below me, the river’s U-bend containing the Isle of Dogs with its high-rise office blocks reaching upwards, the pyramid top of Canary Wharf blinking. To the left a little was the pale-grey dome of St Paul’s, the skinny body and bulbous head of the BT Tower and, seemingly directly behind it, the white arch of Wembley Stadium. (I had lost my sense of direction, as I often did in London, but I must be looking west rather than north if Wembley was right behind the BT Tower.)

  I love London. I love the variety of the buildings, the expanse of the river and the open green spaces, which all make it fresher and more vibrant than any other capital. I particularly loved London in the summer of 2012 and was delighted that the rest of the world seemed to agree.

  I was walking from the hotel in Blackheath across the expanse of Shooters Hill and into Greenwich Park.

  It was the second week of the Olympics and I was enjoying the moment, gazing across to the Olympic Park, which I knew would be humming with people. I could see the main stadium and the red twist of the Orbit to its right. In Greenwich, I walked to work every morning. It was probably no more than a couple of miles, but it gave me time just to be. The walk back up the hill was tougher, but with the sun fading, it was worth the effort.

  When the London Organising Committee were planning venues for the Games, they came to the National Maritime Museum and decided that it would make a magnificent backdrop for an arena. They then went up the hill to the Royal Observatory and realized that the view from there across the Thames to Canary Wharf, the City and beyond was the equivalent of the Barcelona 10-metre diving board, which was outdoors and placed in such a way that the bright lights of the city at night formed the backdrop to the twirls and twists of the divers. Behind their somersaulting bodies were the iconic buildings of Barcelona, including the Gothic spires of Gaudi’s Sagrada Família.

  Greenwich Park would provide a similar effect. This was the chance to show off London to the world, and with Seb Coe a supporter of equestrian sport, it was the perfect site for the cross-country course.

  That decision caused quite a stir both in Greenwich (they didn’t want their park disrupted) and in horsey circles (they would rather go to Windsor, where the infrastructure already existed, than to south-east London), but Seb’s motivation was to bring dressage, showjumping and eventing back into the heart of the Olympic Games. In Atlanta, Sydney, Athens and Beijing, the horse sports had been getting further and further away from the main events, and becoming more expensive (for Beijing, they weren’t even in the same country: they were a four-hour flight away, in Hong Kong). London wanted to prove that a cross-country course could be built anywhere and that the fences could be reused afterwards at other venues.

  I walked through the park towards the press centre, which was in the Maritime Museum, thinking that it had been a brave move, but it had worked. People who had never seen dressage bought tickets, people who had watched horses all their lives came to south-east London for the first time and, most importantly, the horses and their riders were enjoying world-class facilities.

  It all seemed gentler than the frenzy at the Olympic Park. I was back with my horsey people, I had friends working on the host coverage to hang out with, I had my evenings free again, and I thought I’d got through the toughest part of the Games. Now I could relax the reins and gallop home, I hoped.

  I had been covering showjumping for a long time and never seen the British team win a medal at the Olympics or the World Championships (the European Championships had been a tale of frustration and near-misses). The British team of Nick Skelton, Ben Maher, Scott Brash and Peter Charles had the right blend of youth and experience. Ben and Scott were the most exciting young talents in world showjumping, Peter was renowned for his confidence under pressure, while Nick was competing at his sixth Olympics.


  I had been there in Athens when Nick had led going into the final round on Arko, only to make catastrophic, uncharacteristic errors. I knew how long he had been trying to win an Olympic gold.

  The final session of the team competition had a sense of destiny about it. The last time Britain had won a team gold was in 1952 in Helsinki. This time, they stayed level with the Netherlands and went into a jump-off.

  Peter Charles, who was last to go, said to his team mates, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll jump clear. We’ve got this in the bag.’

  He was right. Clear he went and they had won.

  Nick Skelton ran over to my interview position and threw his arms around me in an enormous bear hug. Showjumpers have gained a reputation for being all about the big-money game and never showing emotion. At the Olympics, it’s about pride, honour and history. I won’t pretend my voice didn’t crack a little as I tried to ask them questions that would make all those sentiments come through to an audience that was desperate to share the moment.

  Showjumping wasn’t the only equestrian success story. The Three Day Event team had had plenty of attention, partly because it included Zara Phillips and partly because it was a strong team, with William Fox-Pitt, Mary King, Tina Cook and Nicola Wilson. They won silver in the first week.

  Then it came to the lowest profile and most technical of all the equestrian disciplines: dressage.

  Dressage had always been a mystery to my father. His life had revolved around making horses go as fast as they could. He had no time for getting them to dance around in circles, however much I tried to persuade him that obedience and balance learned in an arena were also useful when you’re galloping towards a 5-foot hedge or turning on a sixpence into an upright gate.