Clare Balding: 'I ended up being overcommitted - I just couldn't cope'

Ten years on from the moment she became the face of a new era for terrestrial television coverage of racing, Clare Balding has said she feared she was "going to completely fall apart" prior to her decision to scale back her involvement with Channel 4 Racing in 2015.

Balding, the BBC's racing anchor from 1998 to 2012, was hired to lead Channel 4's team from 2013 to 2016 after it signed exclusive mainstream rights in a contract that ended BBC Television's association with the sport.

Along with fellow presenters Nick Luck and Rishi Persad, former BBC racing editor and subsequent Channel 4 Racing executive producer Carl Hicks, ex-Jockey Club chief executive Simon Bazalgette and Charles Barnett, then Ascot chief executive, Balding was speaking to the Racing Post for a major feature in Sunday's newspaper recalling the extraordinary negotiations and tough decisions behind the deal and assessing the impact of the loss of the BBC's televised output.

At the same time, Channel 4 decided to switch production of its racing coverage from Highflyer to IMG. Balding fronted the first new-look show on New Year's Day in 2013, albeit from Nicky Henderson's Seven Barrows Stables due to the cancellation of racing at Cheltenham, and she has admitted she found things very tough.

"I remember being very nervous all the way through the Channel 4 years in a way I hadn't been when doing racing for the BBC," she said. "I still wanted to cover racing but I ended up being overcommitted. I just couldn't cope. I thought I was going to completely fall apart."

In 2015, Balding massively reduced her involvement in Channel 4 Racing to just the Cheltenham Festival and Royal Ascot, and she has not been involved in racing coverage since the move to ITV in 2017. She praised ITV for doing "a terrific job", but highlighted something racing has lost through the parting with the BBC.

"Baaeed did not break through to a mass audience in the way Frankel did," she said. "That is not just because Frankel was Frankel and he was trained by Henry Cecil. It's also because quite a lot of Frankel's races were on the BBC.

"With the BBC, it's not simply about the coverage of the sport itself. It's about Sports Personality of the Year, the online content, what you can do on social media and the iPlayer. The BBC tells stories and amplifies stories stronger than any media partner."

Read more from Clare Balding, Nick Luck, Rishi Persad and more in Sunday's Racing Post newspaper. Members' Club subscribers can read the Big Read online from 6pm on Saturday. Click here to sign up.

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