School Days
It’ll come as no surprise I was a bit of a tom boy and used to kick a football around and played cricket, my Dad was a big cricket fan, I played sports with the boys at school, I also loved running but was never all that fast. My real claim to fame at school though was being able to throw. Girls were notoriously not taught to throw properly. If you were a girl you would start off throwing a rounders ball before graduating to javelin and discus. I was the under 11’s rounders ball throwing champion. In fact, much to his disgust, I could out-throw Edward Milliband who I went to school with!
Watching Sport
I’d watch anything and everything when it came to sport on TV and would sit in front of Grandstand very happily for hours on end. In terms of going to watch sport, cricket featured highly, watching village cricket or going to see Kent play with my Dad. My Mum was into horses so the other sport I went to watch a lot of was show jumping, we used to go to the Hickstead Derby. I watched Harvey Smith towards the end of his career and saw him win his last Hickstead Derby when I think he was riding his son’s horse. I was a bit young to have watched the original moment when he infamously gave the V sign but had seen it on TV so knew the history, I also have fond memories of John Whittaker wining on Ryan’s Son.
London 2012
It was the first time I had been to the Olympics. I presented a live Super League programme the night before and hadn’t got in till 1AM. I remember arriving at the park, dumped all our equipment and went through accreditation. The Broadcast centre was one end of the park and the Olympic Stadium was the other and once we’d got accreditation sorted we decided to go for a walk. It was pretty much empty but the odd volunteer was already there. Sometimes you walk into empty stadiums and it feels really weird but on this occasion you just got the sense that this was really going to work, it just felt wonderful. I remember a colleague saying to me sometime after the Olympics that the reason it was so good and felt so right was the volunteers. Some of us slightly cynical hacks were thinking this or that could go wrong whereas the volunteers just instantly got it, even those few that were there when we arrived just set the tone for the whole event. The excitement built wonderfully.
I was lucky enough to be in the stadium when Jessica Ennis, who we were making a documentary on, won gold. Being there on Super Saturday was just incredible. I was in the stadium again the following day when Usain Bolt raced. It’s moments like that you just pinch yourself and think ‘God I’m lucky!’.
Tanya Arnold
Follow @TanyaArnold
Tanya is the main presenter of the Super League Show on BBC One as well as being a regular sports presenter with BBC Look North, Yorkshire’s regional news programme.
Memory added on October 13, 2014
Memory added on June 8, 2021
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