How to become an Olympics expert like Clare Balding

The former head girl is a world champ when it comes to her astonishing grasp of obscure Olympic facts. Here’s the secret to her superpower

Every day, the Olympic Games offers viewers the chance to marvel at the very limits of human ability. From the comfort of our homes, we can tune in to the BBC’s coverage for a fortnight and watch breathtaking feats of human strength, speed and endurance.
The suspension of belief is aided by the fact we invariably don’t have a clue what we’re looking at. Jumping between sports, we meet new star names, learn esoteric rules, and become temporarily invested in something we’d never previously thought about. But to do that we need a guide. And more often than not (well, as far as French employment laws allow), that guide is head girl of the nation, Clare Balding.
To watch Balding – or indeed her colleagues, like Gabby Logan and Hazel Irvine – helm a day of Olympics action is like witnessing an air traffic controller casually oversee a full morning’s arrivals during a snowstorm. It is like seeing David Dimbleby host election night, if all the world’s election nights came at once. 
Balding’s understated warmth and fluency can make it seem as if her sporting knowledge is nothing special, but the question viewers ask most often is a variation on: “How on earth does she know so much about everything?”
The glib answer, “well, it’s her job”, does a disservice to the sheer breadth of her broadcasting challenge – the Olympics contains 32 sports, from breakdancing to archery, with more than 10,000 athletes competing for nearly 330 medals – and myriad storylines to boot.
Being a model professional who prepares well for the day’s task is one thing, but the mountain of information required to adequately jump between that many plots and not lose authority requires a superhuman level of readiness. In some ways, hosting live Olympics coverage is an event in and of itself.
“I love nerdy stuff, and because the researchers are so good at the BBC, we have nerd offs. I ask them things they know no one else will. They like that I like that stuff,” Balding told The Telegraph in April. “And like athletes do with visualisation, this material is really useful in thinking through what might happen before you do a broadcast.” 
Balding, 53, also leads the BBC’s Wimbledon coverage, as well as major horse races and the Boat Race. She is often a part of the presenting team deployed for major national news events, such as the Coronation, hosts podcasts, and casts a dog-lover’s eye over Crufts for Channel 4. 
At her home in west London, which she shares with her wife, the former BBC newsreader Alice Arnold, Balding’s bookshelves are lined by notebooks. One for cycling, one for Olympics history, another for swimming, and so on. She has also admitted she’s a prodigious crammer. “I have a good short-term memory so I’ll mug up on an event like the Commonwealth Games and know it for two weeks. It’s like revising for your exams in school.”
Phil Chambers, a former competitive memory athlete and a memory coach for the last 35 years, has been as struck by Balding’s abilities as the rest of us. The difference is that he has a good idea how she might have honed her powers of recall.
“A big thing in Clare Balding’s favour is that she’s fascinated by it all. Having an interest in something is a huge help when it comes to using your natural memory as a basis for learning facts,” Chambers says.
“Norris McWhirter, who started the Guinness Book of Records, is a good example of this. He knew every single record and its details by heart. But that’s because he was so passionate about it. Clare’s background in horses [she was a leading amateur jockey once] and obvious love of sport is a great starting point.”
Balding, who really was head girl of Downe House School in Berkshire, once claimed she does “a fair amount of background work, but everyone does it”, and went on to cite Hazel Irvine, the veteran BBC Sport presenter perhaps best associated with snooker coverage, as her role model in that area. “That girl isn’t going to get beaten by anybody, and I think ‘good on her’ because she’s fantastic. She’ll never get done for lack of knowledge, which I will.”
Irvine relies on making copious amounts of notes. “When I was at school and university, nothing really stayed in my head unless I wrote it down. I like to feel that I know the answers to some of the questions that I’ll be asking people,” she has said. “If I know I’m prepared, I can relax and enjoy it. There’s nothing worse than turning up to an athletics meet not knowing your subject. I hate that. I also enjoy the discipline of learning and studying, doing my research on the internet. 
“It can be a chore when you’re at school and university, but for me it’s never stopped. I’ve always had to keep doing the same things I used to. The weird thing is that I now enjoy it. Live broadcasting is like sitting an exam every week. It feels really good when you get through the broadcast and it’s gone well. It’s a constant process of preparing, doing it, preparing, doing it.”
Chambers would imagine that in addition to their natural love of most sports, Balding, Irvine et al use a version of the “memory palace technique” – a common but incredibly effective method of learning potentially thousands of pieces of information. “You can create a journey, associating things with different locations, and then you just have to reinforce that journey rather than re-learn each thing.” 
Chambers knew somebody who learnt all 27,000 words of Ernest Hemingway’s short novel The Old Man and the Sea using this technique. “He didn’t know the story, he just memorised it as a sequence of words. Another guy learnt the whole dictionary doing the same thing. It sounds like a lot of “locations” to come up with, but think of all the places you’ve ever lived, be it houses or whole towns – you’ve easily been to thousands of places.”
To make the information stick, he says, you generally “need to review the information five times, with intervals between, then it’ll stick in your long-term memory.” Otherwise it could expire after the period in which you need it – say, after an exam in the morning, or at the end of a two-week Olympics. 
“I don’t know what Clare Balding’s doing, but it could easily be a memory palace technique for short-term, new information, and that’s underscored by her long-term memory for the particular sports she’s always been interested in and passionate about,” Chambers adds. “It’s obviously working well.” 
There are, of course, a few external supports. BBC Sport’s research team, who divide the action up and brief presenters before a broadcast (a similarly intense training session would happen for political presenters on election night), then constantly feed facts and figures in during the programme, are invaluable. 
An earpiece, and the iPad that rests on Balding’s lap or desk throughout, are there to relay those messages. The tablet is also useful should she need to quickly Google a world record she’s not quite sure of. 
And sometimes, it’s simply reams of old-fashioned paper notes that are best. Particularly if the weather’s not on-side. The formidably versatile BBC commentator Andrew Cotter shared a video yesterday of his rain-soaked position for the opening ceremony on Friday. Aside from a small monitor showing the mechanical horses and Lady Gaga, his desk was a mass of papers.
Balding’s sometimes similarly nested in paper notes, but more often than not, she’s simply reeling off information as if it’s second nature. Sometimes it is, sometimes it’s just world-class cramming. Once a head girl, always a head girl.