Poetry and Sport

This unique Olympic-inspired event will be celebrating the union of poetry and sport, with each speaker reading poems about sporting achievements and great human endeavours. Accompanied by a jazz from The Denys Baptiste Quartet, Poetry and Sport promises to be the perfect warm up to this year’s Olympic summer!

Clare Balding is an award-winning British sports journalist. After covering the Olympic and Paralympic Games for over a decade, Clare now presents sports programmes for the BBC and Radio 4.

Laura Badea is a former Romanian fencing champion. Laura has won 3 Olympic medals, including a gold medal for Individual Foil at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.

Chris Holmes MBE is Britain’s most successful Paralympic swimmer ever. Despite losing his sight overnight at 14, Chris has won 9 gold medals, including 6 at the 1992 Barcelona Games – a feat never equaled by any Briton. He was awarded the MBE for services to British sport aged 20.

Edwin Moses is an American Olympic gold medal winning, former track and field athlete. He remained unbeaten for 9 years, 9 months and 9 days. Edwin is also a key innovator in the development of ‘drug-free’ sports.

Tanni Grey Thompson DBE is one of the UK’s most successful Paralympic athletes and has won 11 gold medals. Tanni has also won the London Marathon 6 times, holds a DBE for services to sport and was conferred the title of Baroness in 2010.

Poems performed at the event will be selected from the Winning Words anthology, published by Faber & Faber and the Forward Arts Foundation.