Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My castaway this week is the broadcaster Claire Balding.

The BBC TV coverage of London's 2012 Olympics was her triumph and much like team G.B she'd been in training for her big moment

for quite a while.

She's worked in total on five Olympic Games, four Paralympics, three Winter Olympics and

lots and lots of horse racing. Indeed it's

on the turf that she's most at home. Her father was a champion race horse trainer and

for a number of years she herself was a leading amateur flat jockey. The first

pony she ever rode as a toddler was a gift from the Queen. She went to public

school in Cambridge so privileged yes but you'd be wrong to think she's had an entirely easy ride she has

coped with thyroid cancer being forcibly outed by the tabloid press and curiously in

her own words being a disappointment from the moment she was born.

However, she says, this may sound nauseating but I am a very happy person.

I love my work, I love my life and I'm told by those who know and love me that it's a bit like living with Tigger. Well Tigger

Tigger's are wonderful things as we know Claire Bolding but flash that out a bit

for me what what are you like you're irrepressible full of energy

always on the go? I do have this extraordinary

amount of energy and I have a very peripatetic brain you know it needs to move it needs to

keep going to different places so I need constant stimulation and I found a job where I can get that which is

fantastic and a bit like you know you get to really delve into people's lives

...