Clare Balding has revealed how she once “nearly killed” Princess Anne during a horse race. The 53-year-old broadcaster, who is from a horse racing family who mixed with the royals when she grew up, recalled how she had the unfortunate encounter with the Princess Royal, 73, when she was a young amateur jockey in the Eighties. Before joining the BBC as a trainee sports reporter in 1994, Clare was a jockey and Champion Lady Rider for five years and back then it was expected she would compete professionally for a living, rather than becoming a huge TV star.
During this time she is thought to have raced against Princess Anne and her famous horse-riding daughter Zara Tindall. But in a recent interview, Clare shared how she once almost knocked the senior royal off her horse, but luckily she lived to tell the tale – and joked Anne, who handed her a CBE for services to broadcasting and sport in 2022, had since forgiven her. She told The Telegraph : “Well, it was in a race when I’d only been competing a couple of years.
I got in her [Princess Anne’s] path, we collided and she was nearly unseated. I think she’s forgiven me. She knows I didn’t do it on purpose.
Funnily enough, when she gave me my CBE, having previously presented me with an OBE, she leaned over and said ‘Mmm, I think we’ve been through this before.’” Elsewhere in the April interview, Clare revealed she got her big break in broadcasting thanks to an encounter with her TV hero, the late Terry Wogan. .
