Clare Balding is currently the Royal Television Society's Sports Presenter of the Year and has been voted by the horse racing press as winner of the inaugural Racing Broadcaster of the Year award. Last year, she became the first woman to win the Racing Journalist of the Year Award.

A former champion amateur flat jockey, her specialist subject is racing, but Clare has always covered a range of sports. She was the co-presenter of the main evening highlights programme from both the Athens and Sydney Olympics, hosted coverage of the Paralympics in 2000 and 2004 and regularly works on rugby league. She has twice been a co-presenter of Sports Personality of the Year.

Clare has presented the Lord Mayor's Show for the past two years and will this year branch out further by presenting Crufts for BBC Television. She fronted Housecall in the Country and last year co-presented (with Cilla Black) Superstars for Sport Relief, as well as working on Trooping the Colour.

Clare started in radio and still presents for up to seven hours a day during Wimbledon for Radio 5 Live. She has been the regular presenter for Radio 4's Ramblings for over five years and she occasionally presents editions of Pick of the Week.

With a degree in English from Cambridge, she's achieved her intention to be a sports journalist and writes a regular sporting column for The Observer and has previously written for the Evening Standard, Sunday Telegraph and Racing Post.

Clare has been a guest on Have I Got News For You, They Think It's All Over, A Question of Sport, Test the Nation, Countdown and Call My Bluff.