Passed/Failed: An education in the life of John Inverdale, sports broadcaster

'In the Latin class I read Sporting Life'

(BBC)

John Inverdale, 50, will be commentating on his sixth Olympics for the BBC, from 8 to 24 August on radio, television and online. He has recently commentated at Wimbledon and the Open Golf Championship.

The great thing about school in Singapore, where my dad was a dental surgeon in the Navy, was that you started very early – and finished very early. The rest of the afternoon was spent playing games and swimming. I used to get taken to rugby matches by my father and very often I would write a match report; my father would say, "That's a spelling mistake", or, "That should be a semicolon, not a comma". I also used to listen to the BBC World Service and read the ricepaper airmail editions of the English papers. From a very early age, I was always very interested in the reporting of sport.

At 11 or 12, I came back to England and went as a day boy to West Hill Park prep school in Titchfield, Hampshire. I was hopeless at science; the Bunsen burner held no allure for me. The first teacher for whom I had a massive amount of respect was Peter Headeach, my Latin master. He caught me reading Sporting Life, the horse-racing paper, at the back of his class. I explained that it was the day of the champion hurdles at Cheltenham, and "the Queen Mother's got a horse in it called Escalus". He said that sounded like Aeschylus, the Greek dramatist, so he'd go to the bookmaker's and put some money on it. The horse came third and I like to think he bought us chocolates with the money he won. This made me try so much harder in Latin because I owed him one. He could easily have put me in detention.

I was very lucky to go to Clifton College. I played a lot of sport and was editor of The Cliftonian. The greatest thing was that, in the heart of Bristol, you were never allowed to lose sight of the fact that you were part of a wider community. The schools we played against were isolated in rural communities.

The night before I did chemistry O-level, I don't think I slept, trying to remember the periodic table, but I passed – an indictment against the exam system! – at the lowest level. I was fine at French, although when I was asked in the oral, "What colour is the school blazer", I kept replying in German; I'd had my German oral the previous day.

At A-level I got As in English and history, but an E in French, which I was very upset about. Oxbridge very wisely decided to do without me and I went to Southampton University. My father said, "You're not going to be an academic. You've got to live life to the full at university. The academic workload is an awful lot more in English than in history." So I read history.

I was captain of the university tennis team for two years. Also for two years, I was editor of the university newspaper, Wessex News, and I spent more time doing that than doing my degree. There were four, well, three-and-a-half, of us. Every fortnight we'd be there sticking up until four in the morning, and then we'd go to lectures at 9am, covered in glue. There were bits we were proud of and bits we were horrified at.

My father had said, when he'd dropped me off on my first day, "Turn up at every lecture and turn in every piece of work on time". The number of lectures I missed could be counted on the fingers of one hand. I got a 2:2. I then did a postgrad course in journalism at Cardiff; it rained every day but I had a good time. My parents were very relieved that I actually got a job at the end, on an evening paper in Lincolnshire. My tutor at Southampton said I had to go into the diplomatic corps. When I told him I was going to be a journalist, he said I needed my head examined.