This month see’s the launch of the university’s LGBT network and with this in mind we have chosen Clare Balding as our Inspirational Diversity Champion of the Month.
Clare is a television presenter and journalist who from 1988 to 1993, was a leading amateur flat jockey and Champion Lady Rider in 1990 and was one of the first women elected to membership of the Jockey Club. In December 1997 she became the BBC’s lead horse racing presenter and now fronts the horse racing for Channel 4.
She has reported from five Olympic Games, Sydney, Athens, Beijing and London. She has presented two Paralympic Games, the Winter Olympics from Turin and Vancouver as well as the Commonwealth Games from Melbourne and Delhi, and is the face of the BBC’s rugby league coverage.
In October 2012, she appeared before an All Party Parliamentary Group on Women’s Sport, with Katherine Grainger, Hope Powell and Tanni Grey-Thompson. “Women having freedom to play sport leads directly to women having political freedom,” said Balding.
In 2013 Clare was awarded an OBE for services to broadcasting and journalism.
She has written regular columns for The Observer, the Evening Standard and The Sporting Life. Her autobiography entitled My Animals and Other Family, published on September 2012 won the ‘Biography\Autobiography of the Year’ Award at the National Book Awards.
In February 2013 she was assessed as being one of the 100 most powerful women in the UK by Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4 and also won the award for Sports Presenter at the Television and Radio Industries Club Awards
She formalised her relationship with the BBC Radio 4 continuity announcer and newsreader Alice Arnold in September 2006 by entering into a civil partnership. In July 2010, she made a complaint to the Press Complaints Commission over an article by writer A. A Gill in The Sunday Times that she felt had mocked her sexuality and appearance and for which the newspaper refused to apologise. The PCC found in her favour, judging that A. A Gill had “refer[red] to the complainant’s sexuality in a demeaning and gratuitous way”.
