Walking Home

by Clare Balding

  Many shared his view. At BBC Sports Personality of the Year the previous winter, I had been working for 5 Live, and John Inverdale was hosting a panel that included Michael Vaughan and Matt Dawson. He asked us which sport would be the surprise hit of London 2012, and I said, ‘Dressage.’ They all laughed.

  As it turned out, dressage was the ‘dark horse’ of the second week. The stands were packed as Carl Hester, Charlotte Dujardin and Laura Bechtolsheimer won Britain’s first-ever gold in the team competition. It was Britain’s twentieth gold of the Games, taking us past the tally set in Beijing and marking the best performance by a British team in more than a hundred years.

  There was more to come, and Charlotte, on her bay gelding Valegro, followed up with gold in the individual competition. She and Valegro performed a stirring routine to a montage of uplifting music, including the themes to The Great Escape and Live and Let Die and finishing with ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. It was inspired, and the judges rewarded her accordingly with an Olympic record score.

  The dancing horses had caught on.

  Dad had his epiphany, too. Until that day, he had thought dressage was for sissies and boxing was for tough guys. Just after Dujardin knocked the judges for six with that stunning routine to win the freestyle dressage, Nicola Adams won the first-ever gold medal in women’s boxing.

  My father was in tears. He gets emotional quite easily now, but still. It was a major moment for him. He realized that women can box and that dressage is a beautiful, complicated, technically difficult sport.

  Dad wrote to Charlotte Dujardin, asking her to come to Kingsclere to ride a racehorse. I thought this a little forward of him and that she would dismiss him as a nutter. To her credit, she answered and said that, as she had never galloped fast, she would love to.

  He now has a massive photo in the downstairs loo of himself and his new pin-up, Charlotte Dujardin, galloping upsides on the Downs. He asks me for updates on dressage championships around the world and keeps an eye on Charlotte’s results.

  Oh that he had shown such interest when I was trying to become an Olympic event rider. Dressage was my downfall. The judges never thought much of my tests and, to be honest, I was pretty hopeless at them, lacking the patience, the concentration and the technical ability to make it look effortless.

  The one thing I thought I ought to be able to do was remember the moves. That at least did not involve anything more complicated than doing things in the right order at the right markers.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ my father would bark at me from the drawing-room doorway.

  ‘I’m learning my dressage test,’ I’d say, gesturing at the bits of paper on the floor. ‘Obviously.’

  ‘Well, put the furniture back where it belongs when you’ve finished.’ He’d shut the door, leaving Lily the boxer inside with me.

  Lily, our gorgeous brindle boxer, was my imaginary judge at ‘C’. She sat there solemnly as I hopped around in my dressing gown doing transitions from trot to canter, changed legs, did a half-pass across the diagonal and a shoulder-in down the long side of the room (this is damned difficult when you only have two legs).

  There were letters on pieces of paper in a rectangle around me. I was wearing my thinking hat. (This was a floppy green one my parents had brought back from safari, which I was convinced helped to keep information in my brain. I wore it throughout my O- and A-level revision. In hindsight, it did not have the desired effect.)

  I was reaching the end of my practice test, so I trotted up the centre line, halted at X and saluted Lily with a flourish. One hand down by my side, the other on the imaginary reins of my imaginary pony, I bowed my head for three seconds and then calmly moved off, patting him down the neck and acknowledging the loud and long applause of the crowd.

  My imaginary dressage tests were invariably better than the real thing.

  In between the horsey events, I was covering as many other sports as I could. I reported from the open-water swimming in Hyde Park one morning, where Keri-Anne Payne had finished, agonizingly, just out of the medals, in fourth. I then rushed off to the ExCeL Centre to present the boxing. I got there just in time to hear the commentary of Dujardin’s dressage test and knew she’d won gold. Less than half an hour later, Nicola Adams lifted her arms aloft. In a single afternoon, the full range of sporting options open to women were on show.

  Female membership of gyms and sporting clubs has risen since the Games. I see a renewed ambition among young girls to succeed because they have followed the likes of Nicola Adams, Charlotte Dujardin, Jessica Ennis and Katherine Grainger. Sport is a powerful motivator, and it gives girls a much more honest reflection of the range of their strengths than they will find in a fashion magazine.

  Sport is about what your body can do for you, not what it looks like. A sportswoman can be tall, she can be muscular, she can be competitive, she can be tough, and, thankfully, these are considered positive attributes – a welcome rejoinder to a media that has reduced women to an idealized form of femininity. There is a spirit of determination in women’s sport at the moment to increase sponsorship so that funding of events such as the women’s FA Cup or the Netball Super League or the women’s Ashes can increase and perhaps the women competing can have the facilities, the time and the quality of training that would make a real difference to their performance. Increased funding leads to improved performance leads to increased interest and press attention, which then attracts more companies to want to put funding into sport, and so it goes on.

  At the Olympics, coverage is equally split, because the medals are won by both men and women. Funding of Olympic sports is determined by performance, and so medals are precious not just to the individual who wins them but to those who hope to follow. British women were performing superbly in London and there was one final event in which a medal might be won. I was given the choice of going back to the Olympic Park to be part of the closing ceremony or reporting from the women’s modern pentathlon in Greenwich. I chose the latter, because I wanted to stick with live sport and to know I had worked on the very last event of the Games.

  Samantha Murray of Great Britain started the combined run/shoot in fourth place. Modern pentathlon has a thrilling finale, because the competitors start at staggered intervals, with the leader going first and everyone else seconds behind according to their score. The first past the line is the winner, unlike in heptathlon or decathlon, where you have to work out the points.

  Murray set off on her loops, pausing in the arena to shoot and then running off up the hill again. When she moved into third place and then into second, I realized how keyed up I had been for seventeen days. I started cheering for her and, when it was clear she was going to win silver, I burst into tears. I didn’t want it to end. I knew nothing would ever match this.

  I had no idea of the impact London 2012 would have on me until the following week. I had succeeded in avoiding most of the columns by TV critics; only on the final weekend, when I was reading up on the modern pentathlon, did I see a column in one of the Sunday papers that awarded me a gold medal for presenting. I rang my mother and asked her to save it for me.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t going to tell you about that.’

  As it happens, she had seen and saved every single mention of me in every single newspaper but, quite rightly, hadn’t wanted to distract me while the Games were still going on. Halfway through, when I was on a weekend shift presenting from the studio, my old Radio 1 breakfast boss Chris Evans ran in and said, ‘Hey, you’re getting amazing press! You must’ve seen it.’

  I told him I hadn’t, and I could see he didn’t believe me – but I really hadn’t. There was so much to take in and so many other articles to read that I didn’t want to be thrown off course. I am also wary of the draining impact of negative energy: I didn’t want to see anything bad, so I just avoided all of it.

  Public opinion can turn at any time. I have been on the wrong end of it, and I try to ignore the extremes. The only true indic
ation of whether you are good at your job is whether you get booked again. I said after the Games that being ‘flavour of the month’ by definition only lasts about a month. I wasn’t being falsely modest. I was bathing in the reflected glory of the Games and I didn’t think I deserved plaudits for just doing my job.

  What I hadn’t banked on was the change in association. I wasn’t ‘the horsey lady’ any more, I was ‘the Olympic lady’.

  The bestselling author and cultural commentator Malcolm Gladwell has popularized the 10,000-hour rule. You have to have practised something for ten thousand hours before you become a true expert and can break through. I wonder if it is particularly true in TV, a medium that allows you into people’s homes and into their lives.

  Most regular sports presenters will do about a thousand hours of television a year, so it takes at least ten years, probably longer, to reach a level where you know enough about your job and the audience is comfortable enough with you not to be distracted by how you look or what you sound like. Whether they like you or not, you are familiar. Des Lynam, Sue Barker, David Coleman – all of them earned their place as iconic presenters by putting in the hours, year after year. I am nowhere near their level of popularity or achievement, but I know you can’t get there without doing the graft. The timing of London 2012 was right for me, so in that sense I was lucky – but the preparation for that moment had taken years. As the film producer Samuel Goldwyn and many others have said: ‘The harder I work, the luckier I get.’

  The day after the closing ceremony, Alice and I packed up the car, took Archie and headed down to Cornwall. It was when we stopped at a service station on the A303 that I realized things had changed. Alice went in to pay for the fuel and, as she was standing in the queue, she saw someone reading the paper in front of her. There was a picture of me and the man was pointing out of the window and saying to the rest of the people in the garage, ‘Look! That’s her.’

  When Alice came out, she found me surrounded by a group of children who were all asking excitedly about the Olympics. I was telling them about my favourite events and asking them which sports they liked. We got back in the car.

  ‘Have you got a baseball cap with you?’ she asked.

  ‘I think so,’ I said.

  ‘Good. You might need it.’

  Generally speaking, being recognized doesn’t bother me one way or the other. I don’t mind if I am, because people are very nice (unless they are drunk) and just want to talk about sport, but it’s a bit of a relief when I’m not. We were on holiday recently in Mauritius and a woman came rushing up to our table.

  ‘Hello! When did you get here?’ she asked as she leaned forward to kiss me. She was halfway towards my cheek when it dawned on her that she didn’t actually know me at all. She went through with the kiss, blushed, asked a couple more questions and then left.

  ‘Nope. No idea who she is,’ I said to Alice.

  ‘She has two options now – she’ll either apologize tomorrow and we’ll laugh about it, or do the British thing and completely ignore us.’

  We spent the next three days watching her avoid us.

  Seventeen days after the Olympics finished, I was back at the same venues for the Paralympics. The Games themselves were also back where they started – after a Stoke Mandeville doctor called Ludwig Guttmann fought the accepted wisdom that paralysed servicemen were not to be moved, not to be reintegrated into society and not to be challenged. He refused to allow them to lie in a bed for the rest of their lives and used sport as therapy for body and mind.

  In 1948, on the same day as the opening ceremony of the post-war London Olympic Games, sixteen injured service personnel took part in an archery competition at Stoke Mandeville. A year later, the competition expanded, and Guttmann said, ‘I foresaw the time when this sports event would be truly international and the Stoke Mandeville Games would achieve world fame as the disabled person’s equivalent of the Olympic Games.’

  His prediction started to come true in 1960 when the ‘International Games’ moved from Stoke Mandeville to Rome. They took place one week after the Olympics and included four hundred athletes from twenty-one nations. They all had spinal-cord injuries. In 1976, the criteria were broadened to include athletes with a visual impairment, and amputees. In 1980, athletes with cerebral palsy were added and, in 1984, a new category came in called ‘les autres’.

  I first worked on the Paralympics in Sydney in 2000 and in the intervening years had watched it grow from a curiosity that was sometimes seen as an inconvenience to the host city (Moscow in 1980 and Los Angeles in 1984 had refused to stage it) into a huge international competition with headline names and awe-inspiring performances.

  In China, the 2008 Paralympics was an eye-opener for a nation that had previously ignored, or hidden, disability. They shipped in crowds to Beijing to watch, perhaps unaware of the lasting impact that would have. For the first time, large numbers of Chinese people saw that amputation, paralysis or cerebral palsy was not the end of a life but the beginning of a new one.

  London was the first time the venues and the village had been designed to be fully integrated and access-friendly. The number of competitors and nations represented had never been higher and, for the first ever time in Paralympic history, tickets sold out. Thriller Thursday – the night on the track when Hannah Cockcroft, Jonnie Peacock and David Weir all won gold medals – stands out, while Ellie Simmonds, Sarah Storey and Sophie Christiansen set new standards in swimming, cycling and para-dressage.

  I presented from the studio with Ade Adepitan, who went to two Paralympic Games as part of the wheelchair basketball team and won a bronze medal in Athens. He’s a live wire with a keen interest in all sports and a desire to do the job with enthusiasm and knowledge, but he’s also wildly unpredictable. It was a bit like working with Willie Carson, in that I was never quite sure what he might say next, but it would probably be funny or left-field.

  I suggested that every day we should go out into the park for the start of the programme to get a feel of the place. A studio can be antiseptic, removed from the atmosphere and the action; I much prefer to be in among the crowds, even if it makes broadcasting less predictable.

  We started a daily ‘Ask Ade’ session, where people could pose any question they wanted about Paralympic sport. The kids (and there were a lot of them in the park) loved it.

  ‘Who’s the fastest runner?’

  ‘Who’s the best swimmer?’

  ‘How much does a racing wheelchair cost?’

  ‘How far can you throw a club?’

  The questions came thick and fast and, after a few days, I realized that not one of them had asked about injuries, illness or inherited conditions. They didn’t see the Paralympics as being about disability at all. It was a major sports event in which people tried to run, swim or cycle as fast as they could. If they were racing in wheelchairs, that involved tactical decisions and a different technique – but a wheelchair was just a vehicle, it didn’t represent anything else.

  There is a glorious clarity to children’s thinking. Anna Lisa and Andrew brought my nephews along for a day and they wanted to ride in Ade’s chair, which of course they were not allowed to do.

  The night when I knew the Paralympic Games had struck home was the night Oscar Pistorius got beaten by Alan Oliveira of Brazil in the T43/44 200 metres. It was a stunning race, with Oliveira closing down Pistorius and storming past him in the final thirty metres. We were shell-shocked, but more surprising than the result was Oscar’s reaction.

  I had known him fairly well, having interviewed him twelve years earlier in Sydney and, at his request, I hosted his press conference at the start of the Paralympics. We spent half an hour in the green room chatting before that conference started, and he was relaxed and amiable. I remember being impressed with how he handled being asked the same questions over and over and how he dealt with the incessant flashbulbs. Oscar was a natural performer, saying, doing and wearing the right things, right down to the sponsor
ed sunglasses on his head, despite the fact that he was indoors.

  So I was surprised when he lost his cool and his dignity in the interview straight after that race. We had gone to an advert break, so I was watching the monitor – I could see Oscar hopping from foot to foot (runners on their competition blades don’t have a flat surface to rest on). He had time to compose himself and deal with defeat; a minute is long enough to calm down if you want to calm down. But Oscar wanted to strike out. He accused Oliveira of using illegally long blades and argued that it wasn’t a fair race.

  ‘Not taking away from Alan’s performance,’ he said, about to take it all away, ‘he’s a great athlete, but these guys are a lot taller and you can’t compete [with the] stride length. You saw how far he came back. We aren’t racing a fair race. I gave it my best.’

  I shouted at Stephen Booth, who was editing our programme.

  ‘Boothy, are you listening to this? This isn’t like Oscar. This is extraordinary.’

  I knew we had a story. When I get that feeling it’s like a shot of electricity. I wrote down Oscar’s words so that I’d have a clear reference when we came back to the studio, and I reacted as honestly as I could. Within a couple of hours, the Pistorius PR machine had swung into action and he had apologized, but the damage to his image was done. Twitter went into overdrive, with some accusing him of bad sportsmanship and others pleased to see an angry response to defeat. The Paralympics had a genuine sporting controversy, and the reaction was as it would be in football, cricket or racing – heated.

  We were at the centre of a true live event, and the next two hours flew by. Nights like that are why I adore live television. There is no script, the running order has been ripped up and you’re relying on your wits. It’s scary, but if you nail it it’s the biggest thrill on earth.

  The whole episode was surprising, but even weirder was Oscar’s behaviour the next day.