Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
MY NEW LIFE WITH HORSES BRINGS ME UNBRIDLED JOY
As she makes her debut hosting ITV’s Cheltenham Festival coverage, Victoria Pendleton tells Rebecca Hardy why she swapped the torment of Team GB for a thrilling new career as a jockey
For a woman suffering with a broken ankle, double Olympic gold medallist Victoria Pendleton is in high spirits. The former sprint cyclist turned amateur jockey took a tumble from her horse at a point-to-point five weeks ago. Or, as she puts it, ‘I fell out the side door.’
Believing the injury to be a bad sprain, Victoria hobbled about for nearly two weeks until an X-ray revealed a compound fracture. Which is why she’s on terra firma instead of in the saddle for our photoshoot today. The physiotherapist has forbidden her to mount a horse until the fracture mends, so here she is dressed up to the nines for Cheltenham Festival’s Ladies Day, which she’ll attend this month as a presenter for ITV’s racing coverage, with two, well let’s say ‘frisky’, horses.
Victoria, a tiny slip of a thing beside these towering thoroughbreds, feeds them carrots and pets them. Even when one pulls free and bolts across the paddock Victoria remains full of the joys of spring. Horses are her passion and she’d happily give up both her ankles to be back in the saddle.
‘I so miss riding. I actually have dreams about it,’ she says with the sort of wide grin that endeared her to millions of us at the London 2012 Olympics. ‘I never dreamt about wanting to be a cyclist. I…’ She stops. Thinks. ‘To be honest, I always had this feeling cycling was just a stepping stone.’
Hang on Victoria. A stepping stone? This is a woman who won nine world titles and dominated the sport for seven years, which is more than most athletes achieve in a lifetime. Victoria shrugs. ‘I didn’t grow up thinking, “I really want to be a cyclist.” I was a cyclist. I came from a cycling family and I gave it my best shot.
‘I wasn’t like Tom Daley (the double bronze medal-winning British diver) drawing a picture of myself on top of a podium thinking, “This is what I want to do one day.” I wanted to work with animals. But I feel very fortunate to have had the opportunities I’ve had in cycling because without them I wouldn’t be here now.’
‘Here’ is the Oxfordshire riding stables of racehorse trainers Alan and Lawney Hill, where Victoria, 36, keeps her horses, the black gelding Vesperal Dream and the chestnut mare According To Sarah. It’s a stone’s throw from the converted barn she shares with her husband of three years, former cycling coach Scott Gardner, 42, and their two Dobermans Stella and Mr Jonty.
She spends every hour she can here and this outdoorsy life seems to suit her. More so than the long days she spent in a velodrome ‘going round and round in circles really, really fast’. She is, she says, more confident and less troubled than the Olympic athlete who, along with fellow gold medal winner heptathlete Jessica Ennis, was a poster girl for the London Games five years ago. ‘I never saw myself like that,’ she says. ‘There was a lot of pressure, so when I got the gold in 2012 it was more relief than elation. You want it. You work for it. You’d love to feel joy and there is a rush, but, actually, it’s relief. ‘Firstly, I hadn’t wanted to disappoint the nation, and secondly I felt there were some individuals on Team GB who were less than supportive of me, so I was determined to prove them wrong,’ she says. Br i t ish Cycl ing, the sport’s governing body, has been accused of condoning bullying and discrimination recently and is currently undergoing an independent review.
‘I used to feel very isolated and I’ve been very honest about the fact I used to suffer with depression. It was never at a stage where I needed medication, but I’d become very critical of what I did and then I’d feel helpless, as if everything was slipping through my fingers. You think of all the things that have happened and play them over and over in your head. I’d get into this mindset where it was hard to see a way out.
‘There’s a loss of drive to do things. You’re there but not really present. You feel like a zombie going through your life. By the end I was glad to just get out. I…’ Again, she pauses. Takes a sip of herbal tea. ‘I remember the day I left at the end of the 2012 Games. I packed up all my Team GB stuff and just left. My coaches didn’t even say goodbye.
‘It was weird. I knew from Beijing, where I won my first Olympic gold, that the day after a big event you go, “What now?” Even if it’s gone exceptionally well you feel an anti-climax, but this was really hard. Not only was I finishing a major competition on home turf, I was starting a new life.
‘There were a few people who were good friends and supportive but there were certain individuals who…’ She sips more of her tea. Chooses her words carefully. ‘There were individuals on the team who didn’t even want me to race after 2011 because they felt I didn’t have what it takes despite being the reigning World and Olympic champion. So I had to fight very hard for my place on the team for the London Games. It was one of the biggest struggles I had.’
This is the first time Victoria has spoken at length about the misery she endured as part of Team GB. Former head coach Shane Sutton resigned his post as British Cycling’s technical director in April last year following the launch of the independent inquiry into allegations of sexism, bullying and discrimination. ‘I was never told to “go and have a baby” [as fellow cyclist Jess Varnish said she was] but there were incidents that made me believe what Jess said was true. I contributed to the investigation when I came back from commentating at the Olympics in Rio and spent the whole day talking through everything.’
Victoria thinks her relationship with ‘certain individuals’ on Team GB began
‘I was like a zombie, I had to get out of cycling’
to sour when she fell for her husband shortly before the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Scott was then the British cycling team’s sports scientist – the expert data analyst who helps the coaching team to maximise athletes’ potential. Love affairs between athletes and members of the coaching team are, well, let’s just say you’d be better off getting a puncture in the sprint final.
‘We knew one of us would have to leave,’ she says. ‘We discussed it before we had our first date which is one of the most awkward things you could imagine. You’re sitting with someone you like and having this conversation when you don’t even know if it’s going to work out. You’re like, “I think I like you a lot, but the consequence of this is that one of us could lose our job.”
‘I was 27 and he was 32. We were both at a stage in our lives where we wanted to settle down, but usually when you meet someone you just want to let it evolve. It was embarrassing. Scott went to see the performance director and said, “We’re quite fond of each other. We’d like to go on a date.”’
They went for a meal in Manchester, where the cycling team is based, but were told to keep quiet until after the 2008 Games. To the delight of the nation, Victoria won her first Olympic gold but as soon as the races were over ‘the s**t hit the fan’. Scott had to leave the team and Victoria was ostracised by those ‘certain individuals’ who were spitting teeth they were no longer able to work with the talented Aussie.
‘I haven’t spoken to those individuals since I left,’ she says. ‘I don’t like to think about them and I try not to these days. But who k nows what might have happened if this inquiry had taken place sooner? I could have continued because I finished the fastest and strongest I’d ever been. I thought I had more to give and I didn’t like the idea of my retiring being someone else’s decision. They’d probably say it was me, but you get to a point where you know you’re not welcome and you can’t do it by yourself.’ She smiles. ‘But hey, the further I got away from my career as a cyclist the more confident I began to feel.’
So much so that today Victoria, who tells me she was so painfully shy at school she’d rather be sent out of the classroom than read aloud to classmates, is part of ITV’s racing commentary team, which, having secured an exclusive four-year deal to show British horse racing, will bring us live coverage of close to 100 days of racing a year. Victoria says she ‘can’t get enough of horses’ since taking a challenge from the bookmakers Betfair two years ago to learn to ride in little more than 12 months and compete in the amateur jockeys’ Foxhunter Chase at the Cheltenham Festival. Detractors dismissed her change of saddle as a dangerous gimmick and predicted she’d be lucky if she managed to stay on past the first fence.
Gutsy Victoria proved them wrong when she finished a remarkable fifth on Pacha Du Polder. Betfair then gave her According To Sarah, her first horse, to thank her for her hard work and a few months later she bought Vesperal Dream. This month she returns to Cheltenham to join, among others, jockey Frankie Dettori and main presenter Ed Chamberlin to bring us coverage of one of the most eagerly anticipated meetings in the racing calendar. ‘I feel so blessed,’ she says. ‘I’ll be doing interviews and behind- thescenes stuff. It’s wonderful to have something new in my life – something I genuinely have a passion for that makes me feel so good and so happy.
‘I have a new circle of friends who are so lovely it takes my breath away. I’d never talk passionately about a bicycle. Riding a horse is completely different. It’s a partnership – the two of you together. When you’re galloping you feel like an animal with wings.’
Victoria swells fit to burst with joy when she speaks about riding. It was, she says, something she’d always wanted to do but her father Max, a national cycling champion himself, ruled it out
‘When you’re galloping you feel like an animal with wings’
for fear of injury. ‘Dad’s world was cycling. It was a sport he loved so he wanted all of us to enjoy it to the level he did.’ Victoria grew up in Bedfordshire with her twin brother Alex and an older sister Nicola, but she was the child who showed the most promise as a cyclist. She was nine years old when she first competed and 14 when her father realised quite how talented she was.
When she was 16 Victoria received a phone call from the assistant coach at Team GB ‘out of the blue’. She won her first major medal in the sprint at the 2005 Track Cycling World Championships, becoming the third female British cycling world champion in 40 years. Two years later she won three golds. ‘I always felt I could have done better or tried harder – that I was never doing a good enough job. Even now if I look back over my cycling career I can pick holes in everything I’ve done. It’s nice to win but there aren’t many of my performances that make me feel proud.’
Indeed, since Victoria packed her bags in 2012 she’s tried her hardest to distance herself from the sport that made her a household name. ‘I went straight on to Strictly Come Dancing, which I’d agreed to do six weeks before the Olympics because I thought it’d be a nice way to sandwich in the transition to another world,’ she says. As it was, a physically and mentally exhausted Victoria sobbed her way through much of the eight weeks until she was voted off after finishing bottom of the leader board for the third time. ‘I was rubbish,’ she concedes.
She immediately set about making arrangements for her 2013 wedding to Scott and moving home. ‘I wanted a fresh start. We totally landed on our feet in a charming little village near Thame. We’ve got lovely neighbours and a view from our house over fields with the sun setting in the middle of it.
‘Now I have the freedom to do what I always dreamt of doing. Before I got that call from Team GB at 16, I’d checked out a couple of agricultural colleges. I knew I wasn’t smart enough to be a vet so thought I’d study animal husbandry because I knew I wanted to work around animals and be outdoors.
‘But I got that phone call and my whole world changed. Now it’s like going back to the start, which is why I feel that cycling was a stepping stone. I wouldn’t have met my husband or been able to afford my own horse without the opportunities it’s provided. Now, if I’m asked to do public speaking, I just think, “That’ll keep the horses in livery for a couple of months.” I can’t imagine anything more thrilling. I could be sick with the excitement and joy I feel right now.’
Even with a fractured ankle? She laughs. ‘When you race, even the best jockeys fall off regularly. I can’t wait to get back on.’
ITV Racing: The Cheltenham Festival is on 14-17 March from 1pm on ITV.
‘Now I’m free to do what I always dreamt of doing’