They're [sportsmen] willing to give up a lot of other things that perhaps we all enjoy doing: eating and drinking and playing or whatever. They give up an awful lot to perform at the highest level.

There are very few lows but lots and lots of highs. You're in an incredibly privileged position because you're able to go along to major sporting events and be ringside. You can see and hear everything.

I worked very hard as a young journalist learning the trade and asking questions, understanding what a story is and being able to present that in a way that people would find interesting.

As a presenter, while I might suddenly want to start talking about something completely different, I have to stick to what we've agreed in order for all these other people to get their bits into the programme. So you have to be quite disciplined.

I think it's something that you learn to deal with the more experienced you become. When I first presented live news, which was 12 years ago, I was very inexperienced and probably didn't deal with the pressure as well. I used to breathe very shallow when I was presenting and you could hear it in my voice and see it in my face.

On the day of the game you get there quite early, about 10 o'clock for a 3 o'clock kick-off, because you do a little bit of filming early on. You need to meet the crew and they need to have time to get a cup of tea and all those things the crew like to do before they go out filming.

You don't see what's gone before. A lot of that can be long, long boring hours in the gym, long, long hours on the track or, for the likes of Paula Radcliffe, long hours out on the road in the rain running and running.