The opening question of any interview is one of the trickiest to get right. You can start with a common-or-garden, “Good morning and how are you?”

The opening question of any interview is one of the trickiest to get right. You can start with a common-or-garden, “Good morning and how are you?” Or try to hit the ground running with something more direct. On the programme I present on BBC Radio 5 Live every week, we’ve started doing a feature called “Winners’ Enclosure”. Each week we speak to someone widely regarded as a winner in one athletic endeavour or other.

For the first few weeks I began by asking them how they defined winning. This elicited some decent answers but wasn’t really cutting it. As this question had been my idea, I persisted in asking it long after I should have stopped. My editor, more gently than I deserved, suggested I try a different tack. The question I chanced upon was: “When did you first feel like a winner?” This has yielded some fascinating material. It has the benefit of not being something my interviewees seemed to have given much thought to.

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