Victoria Pendleton is driving us to the stables in Dorset. We’re off to see her two horses, Vesper and Sarah. She has two bags with her – one containing her cycling gold medals, the other crammed with carrots and apples. She is convinced she’s going to feed the horses the medals. At times, you sense she wouldn’t mind.
Ask Pendleton for her greatest achievement in sport, and she’ll tell you about an event that occurred after she retired. She’d only been riding horses for a year when she raced at Cheltenham in 2016, finishing two and a half lengths behind the great Nina Carberry in the Foxhunter Chase. She’s never felt so elated, she says. Does that mean more than the gold medals? “In some ways, because it was totally unexpected. You’re dealing with a live animal so you never know what’s going to happen. All I went in with was my courage – my balls and balance, and nothing else.”
Pendleton is driving her little black sports car, dressed in black tracksuit bottoms and a black top. At 43, she’s still super-fit, as well as gutsy, funny and no-nonsense. Until she starts talking about her struggles as a track cyclist. Then she becomes a very different person.
We get to the stables. Vesper is a black gelding, Sarah a chestnut mare. Pendleton is in her element. She drinks in the perfume of their coats. “They smell heavenly to me. Without sounding too much like a hippy, there’s something about a connection between man and horse – human and horse, I should say. They are such big, magnificent animals, and so generous in their spirit. They let you sit on their backs and tell them where to go and how fast to go and they give you everything when they’re racing. It makes me so happy.” They have more soul than a bike? “Yeah!”
Her horse-racing achievements followed her final Olympics, where she won a gold medal at London 2012 in the keirin (a sprint following a speed-controlled start) and a silver in the conventional sprint. Although her achievements have since been overtaken by Laura Kenny (who won five Olympic gold medals and recently announced her retirement), Pendleton was Britain’s best known female cyclist at the time. To most of us, it looked as if she was retiring in a blaze of glory. But not to her. She was, and remains, hugely disappointed she didn’t win three gold medals at the London Olympics.
Pendleton is known for being hard on herself. Hers is a very particular story of a woman succeeding in what was then Britain’s male-dominated and macho cycling environment. It’s also a story of a woman succeeding against the odds. Pendleton is much lighter and less muscular than most female track sprinters – it’s like long-distance legend Mo Farah winning the 100m. Finally, it’s a story about a woman determined to be the best, and ultimately triumphing in a sport she didn’t much like.
Her relationship with cycling was complicated from the off. Pendleton’s father, Max, was an obsessive amateur cyclist and grass track champion. From when she was the age of nine, he would take Victoria and her twin brother, Alex, out every weekend racing with him. Often he’d sprint ahead, not waiting for them to catch up. Max would set up children’s races to keep them occupied, even if they were the only competitors. Pendleton says she thought this was normal, the way all kids lived. “I thought every family did something like that at the weekends, but clearly not.” She smiles.
Max Pendleton was desperate to make something of himself as a cyclist. Not even a big something. Victoria thinks he would have died happy finishing last at the Olympics. Just being there would have been enough. But it wasn’t going to happen.
At first, Alex was the stronger cyclist of the two, but before long, Victoria overtook him. However, as a schoolgirl growing up in Bedfordshire, it was team sports she adored; she played hockey for Harpenden, but wasn’t good enough to make a career of it. “I would love to have played a team game like that.” Why? “Camaraderie. When you win as a team it feels better than when you win as an individual because you’re sharing it with a bunch of people.”
And yet it was on a bike that she started beating all comers. Did she love cycling back then? “No. I wanted to be good at cycling. I liked training, as in I liked improving and pushing myself and having something to work towards.” What she wanted was to be the best. At anything. She was 16 when she was talent-spotted by the assistant national coach at British Cycling, Marshall Thomas. “I got a phone call from him. He said: ‘We’ve noticed you in the weekly cycling results and wondered whether you’d be interested in coming to Manchester to be tested to see if you’ve got what it takes.’”
Up until then, her father had trained her. He handed over responsibility to Thomas at British Cycling’s HQ. But cycling was still a minority sport; little more than a hobby, as far as Pendleton was concerned. Certainly not a career. She had hoped to be a vet, but her exam results weren’t good enough. She contemplated animal husbandry, zoology and conservation. In the end, she studied sports science at university because it made sense with the cycling. She was given a £1,000-a-year grant towards training expenses.
In 2002, after university, she went to Switzerland to train. Pendleton was the only woman among a group of men that included Olympic stars Chris Hoy, Jason Queally and Craig McLean. She felt she didn’t deserve to be there.
Pendleton has always struggled with confidence. When did she first think she was good enough to race at the Olympics? “I didn’t believe I should be on the team till I won my first world championships in 2005. I was 25, and I finally thought: ‘Well, maybe I could do this successfully,’ because I genuinely believed they had made a mistake in choosing me. I thought: ‘They’re going to realise any moment that I don’t have what it takes.’”
She had to become world champion before she thought she was good enough to be a contender? She laughs, a little embarrassed. Pendleton says the Olympics was always the pinnacle for her. “To even get there was a big deal.”
She had actually raced in the 2004 Athens Olympics, a year after finishing fourth at the world championships. Pendleton hoped for a medal in Athens, but went out in the first round of the sprint. “I was gutted,” she says. “I was about to pack it in. I was like: ‘I told you I didn’t have what it takes.’” She pauses. “I know that sounds weird. Top 4 in the world, you must be good, but to make any money out of this or to sustain this career, I had to be Top 3 or better because there’s no career to be made as fifth or sixth best in the world.”
She returned home, disconsolate. “I put all my stuff in a black bin liner, and put it in the bin. I wanted to erase the whole experience. My mum took it out of the bin, and said: ‘You might regret that; it’s a really big achievement to be part of the Olympics team.’”
Pendleton didn’t give up. She focused on the next Olympics. But her relationship with the coaching team began to break down. Pendleton’s great rival was the Australian cyclist Anna Meares, and she felt her coaches respected Meares more as an athlete. “Anna was strong, muscly and aggressive. And that’s what they wanted. Like: ‘Why can’t you be more like Anna Meares?’ Well, I’m not like Anna Meares. I’m not as strong as her, I don’t lift as much as her. I felt they’d talk about her performance more appreciatively than mine. I’d be like: ‘But you’re on my fucking team, come on, this is crazy.’ In her team she was considered the best and everybody rallied around Anna. I was like: ‘Can I please have some of that?’ I was so envious of her. I would just like to have had the same respect as my peers, that’s all.”
In her memoir, Between the Lines, Pendleton claims the chief coach, Shane Sutton, told her variously to “man up”, “be more of a bitch” and “get more c-u-n-t in you”. (She says he spelled it out so as not to cause offence.) How did she react? “Back in the day you didn’t think anything of it. I was so familiar with that language it didn’t hurt me. It didn’t cut me up inside, but I couldn’t deliver what they were asking.”
The situation reached its nadir after Pendleton admitted to having a relationship with a member of her coaching staff, sports scientist Scott Gardner. In the buildup to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, they kept it secret because they knew it could prove disruptive and that her fellow cyclists might regard it as unprofessional. A couple of months before Beijing, Gardner told Sutton about their relationship and Sutton informed the performance director, Dave Brailsford. Sutton and Brailsford told Pendleton and Gardner that it would be best not to tell other team members until after the Olympics.
In Beijing, Pendleton only competed in the sprint and duly won her first Olympic gold medal, beating Meares in the final. It was the culmination of everything she had worked for. But it turned into one of the bleakest moments of her life. The following day, Sutton and Brailsford decided it was time to tell the rest of the team, including her coaches Jan van Eijden and Iain Dyer, about her relationship with Gardner. In Between the Lines, she writes that Van Eijden told her it was an act of betrayal. He and Gardner began to row. In the book, she writes that she was so distressed she took a pair of scissors and cut her arm in front of them. “I was inconsolable,” she says today. “I was so distraught. I was like: ‘You don’t understand. You see me crying and you just think I’m crying, but I’m really, really hurting now.’ And I needed to prove I was hurting because they weren’t taking me seriously. I wanted them to take me seriously.” She becomes tearful.
“They were so upset with me – disgusted, like I’d committed a crime. But the relationship didn’t make me any less of an athlete or any less professional or any less successful. It should have been the happiest moment of my life, and it was taken away because some people’s egos were hurt because they weren’t told, because we were told not to tell them.” Gardner was asked to leave the team, although he was rehired in the buildup to London 2012.
As a cyclist, Pendleton was at her peak, winning world titles in the sprint in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2012. But she felt ostracised, and found it increasingly difficult to turn up to training. It wasn’t just the team she was battling. She was fighting her own biology. Her natural weight is about 55kg (8st 9lb). Her competing weight was 62.5kg (9st 11lb), which still left her the lightest woman in the field. She had to constantly stuff herself to make that weight. “You’re doing training that makes you feel like you want to vomit, then you’re trying to put food in. It’s really hard. You’re like eugh, just eat it. Lots of animal protein. Chicken, more chicken, grilled chicken, boiled chicken, steak.” She looks as if she could puke just talking about it.
Her form going into 2012 was phenomenal. She was competing for three gold medals, knew it was going to be her final Olympics, and for all her self-doubt told herself success meant winning all three. Her willpower was extraordinary. “As soft as people have made me out to be, an emotional wreck or whatever, I am really tough. Resilient. I might not look it.” This is the Pendleton paradox. Slight as she may be, tearful as she often is, she is made of steel. “I commit 100%. I think that absolute desire and drive to fulfil potential isn’t something you find in everybody.” She compares competing to going to war.
London 2012 was, in many ways, the apogee of British sporting achievement – 29 gold medals, 65 medals in total, a gloriously sunny summer, the best kind of national unity. Team GB won eight out of the 18 cycling gold medals, and Britain was the only country to win more than one gold in cycling. It was an astonishing achievement. Was 2012 happier for her than 2008? “Yes,” she says, but it sounds more like a question than a statement. “In some ways. I was stronger. I’d accepted my fate a little bit.” What does she mean? “I got familiar with the way I was going to be treated. I had a finite goal to work towards because I knew I was retiring after 2012.”
Although she didn’t manage the clean sweep, Pendleton finished 2012 with a gold medal in the keirin and a silver in the sprint. Did she feel good when she won the gold? “No, I felt relieved that I’d managed to do that by myself, because that’s how it felt. That it was me and a few select people, but very much not a team effort. It was a dedicated group of a few individuals and I thought: ‘Thank God I haven’t let them down.’ I felt pure relief. Nothing more than relief.” She names those who supported her through this time – Gardner, of course, psychiatrist Steve Peters, strength and conditioning coach Mark Simpson, mechanic Ernie Feargrieve, soigneur Luc De Wilde. Pendleton is loyal to those who were loyal to her.
But 12 years on she still can’t hide her disappointment. “I underperformed, and that’s the reality of it. If it had all gone to plan I could have come away with three gold medals. And I failed. I will always feel a sense of underachievement. I always wanted more for myself.” Again, she’s on the verge of tears. “I remember the races I screwed up more than the ones I won, because they cut the deepest.”
Wow, I say, 12 years on and you’re still devastated by the losses rather than celebrating the successes? “I know it seems crazy. Looking back, I’m pleased I gave it everything I had. Do I wish I achieved more? Yes.” Pendleton is the most self-flagellating athlete I have met.
It ended in such anticlimax, she says. “After my last event, everybody was disappointed because I only won silver. My coaches left the village without saying goodbye. I didn’t expect them to. Why would they? They were glad to be rid of me.” She says a designer handbag was left on her bed by way of thanks for her decade of service to Team GB. “If somebody had made a concerted effort to shake my hand and say: ‘Thank you for everything you’ve given to the team,’ it would have meant a thousand times more than a handbag.” It was actually a lovely bag, she says, but for years she couldn’t bring herself to use it because it reminded her of the breakdown of her relationship with the team.
Have they apologised for the way they treated you? “No! No! Not at all. They’ll claim I was super-difficult and mentally challenging.”
Straight after the Olympics she retired at 32. Although she said it was her decision, today she says it didn’t really feel like that. “I did feel very much bullied out of the team. I twisted the story to make it sound like it was my own choosing, whereas the reality was I didn’t have the strength to walk in there another day.” Did she at least feel the public loved her? “No, not really. I think I should have been more reserved and not so honest about the way I was feeling because that might have changed the public perception of me. But whenever anybody asked me how I was feeling, I always told them the truth. All out. Maybe that was the wrong thing to do.”
As soon as she retired, she changed her diet. “The first thing I did was become vegetarian, then vegan. I cut out all the things I was forced to eat.” On principle? “Well, it is principle, but also it’s got such negative connotations. When you’re gagging as you’re eating it, it puts you off!”
Although retirement came as a relief in some ways, it also proved difficult. “Having all the freedom in the world can be as paralysing as having none.” She felt lost. She competed in reality shows such as Strictly, wrote her memoir, took on endurance events, and worked as a BBC pundit for the 2016 Olympics. Pendleton was treated as a star, a great British success story, but she didn’t feel like one. “I felt a fraud. Who am I to be asked about these things? I always felt like a fraud. I felt so disappointed in myself and what I achieved.” Does she think she’ll ever embrace her cycling achievements? “I don’t know when the time will be that I’ll look back and feel proud.”
But there is one achievement even she doesn’t quibble about. In 2015, Betfair set her a challenge – to switch saddles from bike to horse and ride in a competitive race at the 2016 Cheltenham festival. Pendleton had never sat on a horse before. It was a brilliant publicity stunt by the gambling company, even if it felt like an impossible ask.
“How ridiculous was that as an idea?” She laughs. It transformed her life. “I found something I wanted to get out of bed for. I lived and breathed like an exercise jockey for 18 months. I’d come to the yard, ride two or three horses, maybe four or five if I felt like it. You wash the horses after, tack up a new horse, do the training for the horses, and I loved it. Absolutely loved it. It was a whole new lease of life, and if I’d not done the cycling that opportunity would never have come my way.”
Finally, she says, a coach brought out the best in her. Yogi Breisner, who led the British eventing team to four successive Olympic team medals, encouraged her all the way. “He is a legend of the sport, and when I went into my equestrian training he said how very coachable I was and how he enjoyed working with me. He complimented me, and he said: ‘You’re very courageous.’” She becomes emotional repeating his words. “And I’m like, am I?” Courage is a word she loves, she says, but one she had never associated with herself, largely because nobody had ever told her she was courageous. “I really thank him for that. I learned so much from him and what a coaching experience could be like.”
Now she happily accepts that taking on the challenge was an act of great courage. “Starting from nothing and becoming a jump jockey, I could have died doing what I was doing on a horse, or become a quadriplegic. Professional jump jockeys are unseated once every 14 rides. And they’ve been doing it their whole lives. So I was doing something that was dangerous and a totally different experience. Also, the press were saying: ‘This is ridiculous, she’s a danger to herself, she can’t do this, it can’t be done.’” But she proved it could. On 18 March 2016, 12 months after first sitting on a horse, she competed in the Foxhunter Chase at Cheltenham, finishing fifth out of a field of 24. “It was the most exhilarating and rewarding moment of my life.”
But that elation didn’t last. Pendleton has always suffered with depression, and in 2018 she reached a low. She was forced to abandon an attempt to climb Mount Everest after suffering hypoxia (a lack of oxygen to the brain), she and Gardner were divorcing, and she was experiencing severe panic attacks. She simply lost the will to live, she says. “I got into a spiral. I just felt: ‘What’s the point in carrying on?’ I thought: ‘What’s the point of getting out of bed?’ I’d be staring at the wall, feeling nothing.” In 2019, she told the Telegraph she had seriously considered suicide.
What stopped you killing yourself? She says the former British Cycling psychiatrist Steve Peters, for one. “And my brother. He always knew the right thing to say, my twinny.” She sniffs up her tears. “I need another tissue. Sorry about that.”
Alex had been diagnosed with leukaemia as a child, and after three decades in remission his cancer returned. Last June he died, after battling a brain tumour for two years. Pendleton can barely get out her words when she talks about him – how close they were, all they shared. You must miss him hugely, I say. She nods. “Alex saved my life, but I couldn’t save his.” And now the tears come in a torrent. “On one of my darkest days he just drove to my house uninvited. He could hear I was really down and he just turned up. And … yeah … he was very good in times of need. When I see twins I feel a sense of joy, like, you’re so lucky. You’ve got someone there with you all the time. Nothing is too scary. Like the first day at school – you’ve got someone there.” Does it feel like a physical absence? “Oh yeah. I do feel half …” she trails off. Then her face lights up at a distant memory. “At some family gathering someone said: ‘You’re a lovely little girl, aren’t you?’ And I said: ‘I’m not a little girl, I’m a twinny.’ And that’s how I saw myself. A twinny was far superior.”
She watches a horse canter gracefully in the yard. “I wish I could get my horse to canter that slowly.” She says she’s worried she’s painted too negative a picture of her career. “Oh God, it sounds depressing, doesn’t it?”
She drives me back to the station. “The thing is, all that work and sacrifice and suffering was worth it. It was a bit of a shitshow, but I loved being an athlete because I loved feeling like a superhero, feeling as strong and physically capable as I could be. It’s a lovely feeling to be in your physical prime, and it’s stood me in good stead because I still keep fit and do things far above and beyond my age range. I still put people to shame.” Before we met today, she ran 5km, did a series of 100m sprints and treated herself to an ice bath just for good measure. “It’s torture,” she says, with relish. “Everything it’s given me, post-cycling, all the opportunities, I wouldn’t have had them if I’d not been through that.”
Despite her struggles, Pendleton feels she has finally got her life back on track. Sure, she’s still disappointed with only two Olympic gold medals, sad she lost so much time to depression, and she knows Alex is irreplaceable, but she’s starting to accentuate the positive. She now realises there is no way she would have the life she does today without her Olympic triumphs. Cycling might have caused her all sorts of physical and emotional pain, but she says it’s payback time. “I’ve basically been a lady of leisure since 2012, and that makes me feel a bit guilty. I keep saying to my mum, I’m going to get a proper nine-to-five job, and she’s like: ‘Don’t be ridiculous, you put in enough work before this.’ I’m a very lucky girl.”
In 2019, she met former special forces operator Louis Tinsley on the C4 reality show SAS: Who Dares Wins. After the series, they started a relationship and have been together ever since. In the past, she has said she wanted to have children, but now she’s decided she prefers life as it is.
She has a couple of properties she rents out, a few venture-capital trusts, she rides Sarah and Vesper, does public speaking, has sponsorship deals and all the time in the world to challenge herself. “I’m going to learn how to skydive and get my accelerated freefall licence. I’m going to take up surfing. As a kid I would have been: ‘Wow, that’s so cool!’ My career has allowed me all kinds of freedoms and opportunities that I would never have dreamt of.”
There are other positives. The once fraught relationship with Anna Meares is now a friendly one. “We get on really well. She sends me pictures of her daughter on her riding lessons on this cute little pony. It’s very sweet.”
For many years, Pendleton’s allegations about the culture at British Cycling went ignored. But in 2016, four years after she retired, Shane Sutton was suspended by British Cycling, following allegations of sexism and bullying by the cyclist Jess Varnish, supported by Pendleton and fellow Olympic champion Nicole Cooke. Sutton resigned soon afterwards. There was an internal investigation into Varnish’s complaints, with Sutton cleared of eight of the nine allegations. But a complaint that he used sexist language towards her was upheld.
In 2017, the then chairman of British Cycling, Jonathan Browning, admitted success had “come at too high a price” and that while British Cycling had excelled at performance and participation, it had not put enough emphasis “on the third P: people”. The inquiry prompted by Varnish’s allegations resulted in a 39-point action plan to revamp British Cycling’s culture and management. While Browning said: “We would like to place on record our apologies to those concerned. We sincerely regret where any of those negative experiences have occurred,” he never apologised directly to Varnish, let alone Pendleton or Cooke.
When the Guardian put Pendleton’s experiences to British Cycling (including her claims that she wasn’t treated with respect by the coaching team; was ostracised by them as a result of her relationship with Scott Gardner; and felt bullied out of the team) its performance director, Stephen Park, acknowledged it had failed her. “Since Victoria left the Great Britain Cycling Team programme we have been determined to learn from her experience, and that of others, to ensure that we provide the best possible culture and support for our riders both on and off the bike.
“Through the work we did as part of the Cycling Independent Review, and further progress we have made since, it’s clear that our programme has changed dramatically over the past two Olympic cycles. However, we apologise to Victoria and others whose experiences fell way short of the standards we now expect.” It is the first explicit public apology Pendleton has been given.
When the Guardian put the allegations to Sutton that he treated Pendleton differently from the male cyclists and that he used inappropriate language, he replied: “It’s probably what she needed at the time and that’s why she was one of the greatest sprinters of all time. She needed to be told how it was every now and then. Word for word I can’t confirm, but can certainly say it was a pleasure to be part of an amazing group of athletes in that period, Vicky being one of them. We are judged on results. We created a culture of success, but some don’t see it that way.
“Ask her how many times I got stuck into the boys about swearing and farting in front of her and said we have a lady in the van. Always two sides. But in the heat of battle the tone is different. I respected Vic, still do, and she was one of the few ladies in female cycling. I always treated her like a lady.”
Pendleton says she is finally beginning to see her career from a new perspective – as a pioneer who paved the way for a better future. “If you look back in history, there are a lot of things that worked at the time but became outdated. Maybe for the time and place where I existed that was my journey I had to live through, but now thankfully it seems like a much more evolved and understanding environment.”
A couple of years ago she was invited to meet up with the British women’s cycling team and was struck by the transformation. “Kaarle McCulloch was the coach at the time and she invited me to meet the girls. I saw them training and was so impressed. I was like oh my God! They were being encouraged to have interests outside of cycling, and they had a real control over, and voice in, what they were doing. I said to Kaarle: ‘Seeing what you’ve been doing to these girls makes me so happy because this is the kind of environment I could only have dreamed of. They’re being treated like adults and individuals and they’re performing.’ I was just like ‘Yes!’”
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counsellor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org