Why I love...skiing

By BBC Sport Online's Pranav Soneji

Roger Moore is annoyed. If there is one thing that really makes him furious, it's snowboarders on the ski slopes.

"They are lethal", he says with a passion borne from previous experiences with the piste culprits.

"They have no regard for the people below - they usually take aim at skiers and they frighten the life out of me."

Moore is obviously a skiing purist, yet he did not discover Europe's favourite winter pastime until he was 50.

Now, where's that blasted snowboarder?

Because of his high-profile occupation, insurance experts ruled downhill skiing was too hazardous a pastime - but that did not deter him from donning the salopettes and goggles.

"I started doing cross country because downhill skiing was considered too risky by all the moneymen," he explains.

"If I broke my leg or arm, I would be incapacitated, as would the film or television production I was then working on."

He continues: "I started to learn to ski at 50 - quite an achievement, I think, considering all the obstacles in my path.

"I had to overcome vertigo and the embarrassment of nursery slopes, which would inevitably be inundated with an army of children and photographers all waiting for me to fall over."

Child's play

But the time he invested alongside the five and six-year-olds on the slopes near his Swiss home gave Moore the confidence to ski whenever he can.

"The sheer effort of going to the nursery slopes made me take off two kilos in weight," he says.

"I go skiing every day now and the slopes that used to take least an hour to ski down now just take two minutes."

But the 73-year-old admits he will never reach the dizzy heights of his children, whose lessons on the slopes would often coincide with his own tuition.

People think that just because I was James Bond, I can do anything

  Roger Moore

"My children would say to me 'Don't go to the mountain today because the school is going to be there'.

"They were genuinely embarrassed to be seen on the same slopes as me."

That is one of the few disadvantages of playing James Bond.

The general public often forgets that the silverscreen and real life are two very different things.

"People think that just because I was James Bond, I can do anything," shrugs Moore.

"So when I kept falling over, my children were embarrassed because their friends expected me to glide through the ice just like 007."

Whether 007 would have been able to transfer his skills to the snowboard, however, remains to be seen.