Poor John Inverdale. By now he must regard the microphone as his enemy, which is never a good thing when you're a broadcaster. All he could be grateful for yesterday, really, was that Jeremy Clarkson happened, which at least saw him drop to number two in the Twitter trending thingie.
On the off-chance you missed it - during a chat on BBC Radio 5 Live's coverage of the Cheltenham Festival with former jockey John Francome and young jockey Lizzie Kellie, he uttered the immortal line:
“This is looking at it through rose-c**ted … eh, eh…. rose-rose-tinted glasses from the past … I, I, I apologise there for a slip of the tongue….. but Lizzie your love of the sport just shines through.”
Lizzie: “Oh yeah, um….”.
There’s no award golden enough for Lizzie after she somehow and highly heroically proceeded to chat about her shiny love for horse racing, although Francome fell silent for a moment, seemingly more winded than he ever was after a fall.
In his bloopers list, then, this might now overtake Inverdale's most famous previous 'moment', when, back in 2013, he said of Marion Bartoli as she hugged her father after winning Wimbledon: "Do you think Bartoli's dad told her when she was little 'You're never going to be a looker? You'll never be a Sharapova, so you have to be scrappy and fight?"" And with that the BBC switchboard melted down.
Inverdale blamed his hay fever for the remark - "I was feeling so ill - all I could think of was that I wanted to go home to bed" – but this being early March, that's unlikely to account for yesterday's hiccup. Nor, possibly, that moment in 2008 when he was hosting the Sports Journalists' Association awards on the day of the divorce settlement between Paul McCartney and Heather Mills, which saw Mills awarded £24.3m. "She landed on her foot," he said of, eh, the woman whose left leg was amputated after an accident.
Nor, perhaps, the time in 2006 when he asked his guests on BBC Radio Five Live if they could remember the name of the horse Princess Anne rode when she won the European Championship in 1971. They had no clue. So, he suggested: “Camilla?”
Honest, he did. The knighthood slipped away.
