“You’re not anybody in America unless you’re on TV. On TV is where we learn
about who we really are. Because what’s the point of doing anything
worthwhile if nobody’s watching?” – Nicole Kidman, To Die For
My interview with Victoria Pendleton has just ended and she is begging me not
to mention the stuff she thinks was off the record; her secret use of
incontinence pads; her feelings for Jeremy Clarkson; and, oh yes, that small
matter of the time she travelled to London for the porn shoot. “No,
pleeeee-ase, don’t,” she pleads.
Oh dear. She has obviously mistaken me for one of those cycling-mad tree
huggers who write for The Guardian.
The incontinence pads? She had them out again last month at the Olympic track
in Beijing when a 40mph crash during a World Cup race ripped a huge chunk of
skin from her elbow and hip, leaving two gaping wounds that oozed pus and
splinters for weeks. Enter the incontinence pads: “They’re great for
mopping-up the gunk,” she explains.
Her feelings for Clarkson? Well, basically she would like to ram one of those
gunk-filled pads down his throat. “It’s a risky business being a cyclist in
the UK,” she says, “and there are a lot of people who really dislike us.
It’s the Jeremy Clarkson influence – we’re hated on the roads – but we just
hope that people realise we are just flesh and bones on two wheels. And if
someone knocks me off, they are not just putting me out of work for a few
weeks, they are potentially ending my career and everything I have worked
for since the age of nine.”
The porn shoot? That will be the trip she made to London last summer for a
sponsor’s promo-tion, and when she arrived at the studio wearing a casual
T-shirt and jeans and was asked to strip. “We’d like to make the shoot more
glamorous, Victoria,” they explained, and presented her with a selection of
gowns from the Amanda Wakeley collection.
She posed wearing a splendid black dress next to her track bike. It was Miss
Pendleton as we had never seen her before and Times
Online ran with 11 of the photos. A few days later, her team manager
called sounding gruff: “What’s all this about you doing this porno shoot?”
he moaned.
“I love dressing-up and really enjoyed it,” she says. “I’m still a girl and
love putting a frock on and high heels and feeling feminine. I worry
sometimes with all of the training I do that I won’t look feminine; that I’m
not very attractive. So it’s nice sometimes to make the effort and (sounding
posh) ‘feel like a lady’.”
Miss Pendleton, 27, clearly has some growing up to do. Okay, so she is a
triple world champion and a (Sunday Times and Sports Journalists’
Association) Sportswoman of the Year, but was that enough for the Gods at
the BBC? Did it earn her a nomination for Sports Personality of the Year?
What’s the point of doing anything worthwhile if nobody is watching?
Okay, so she is attractive and feminine and every inch a lady, but what is
wrong with a hint of tramp? Did Coleen McLoughlin make her name by hitching
herself to someone attractive? Did Jade Goody get where she is today by
doing feminine? Did Katie Price, the glamour model Jordan, build her
multi-million-pound fortune by being lady-like? Beauty is not enough.
Winning is not enough. There’s a lesson Miss Pendleton urgently needs to
learn: How to be bad.
“He speaks to me as if I was a public meeting” – Queen
Victoria, referring to Gladstone
WE MEET on a freezing afternoon in mid-December at her parents’ home in
Stotfold, Bedfordshire. She is wearing a black adidas T-shirt and a pair of
matching jeans and is posing for her portrait in the garden, where the
brilliant winter sun and light dusting of frost on the field is a perfect
canvas. It’s tasteful. It’s arty. It will make a brilliant cover-shot for
Horse & Hound but is not going to make the pages of GQ.
“What about posing in some lingerie?” I suggest.
“No problem,” she says, laughing, “but all of my nice stuff is in [her
apartment] in Manchester and you wouldn’t want to see me in anything my mum
has bought me.”
She finishes the shoot and we pick up the thread inside when I present her
with a copy of one of the shots that appeared in The Times. “Did you feel as
ridiculous as you look?” I inquire.
“Oh, don’t,” she replies, horrified. “I don’t look ridiculous ... I look very
glamorous and I thoroughly enjoyed it.”
“You look extremely glamorous,” I agree, “but this pose with the spanner over
your right shoulder?”
“I was fixing my wheel,” she smiles.
“The reason I’m interested is that quote that was attributed to you after you
hadn’t been nominated for the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year Show: ‘I
would have liked to have been nominated but the BBC awards are not for
achievements are they? They’re personality awards’.”
“Yes,” she says. “So the question I’m asking I suppose is: how does Victoria
Pendleton become a real personality?”
“Well, you tell me,” she replies.
“She puts on a black dress and poses with a spanner in her hand.”
“Well, that obviously didn’t work, did it?” she smiles.
“She learns to pout.” “To pout? Yeah, maybe ...” “She does a lingerie shoot.”
(She explodes with a guffaw.) “Believe me, I don’t look that great in
lingerie – not with all the work I do to get my thighs bigger and musclier.”
“You have also explained it by saying that you are ‘under no illusion as to
where cycling stands in the public mind’.”
“Yes, I think it would be easier if I played football or rugby or cricket or
tennis but I’m a cyclist, a track cyclist.”
“So the problem is your sport?”
“Yeah.” “What about the doping scandals and the general perception of your
sport? Has that had an impact on you at all?”
“Who knows if it has or hasn’t,” she replies, warily.
“Well, surely you know?” I ask.
“It’s very frustrating for me,” she says, “especially when people outside of
cycling think that road cycling and track cycling are linked in some way.
Yes, we both ride bicycles but our bikes are very different and we don’t
have the same pressures or sponsorship commitments that the road cyclists
have.”
“The question was how it had impacted on you?”
“I get asked about it a lot,” she says, “especially during the Tour de France,
when people were ringing me up for interviews and I turned most of them down
because I was afraid that if someone twisted my words, it would somehow link
me to drugs in sport and I didn’t want to be involved with that. I’m clean.
I know I’m clean. I fill out a data-base of where I am every day. I stick to
the rules because I want the sport to be cleaner, and I want sport in
general to be cleaner, because I hate, above everything else in the world,
things that are unfair.” “Sounds like a pretty good answer to me,” I say.
“Why didn’t you say that during the Tour?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “There was a lot of hype and everyone was excited,
and I don’t know enough about it to give a valid opinion.”
“But it annoys you that people make the association with what you do?”
“Definitely, because it’s very different; it’s completely different. I’m not
in this sport to make money; I’m not going to be an icon. I don’t have much
to gain from winning except knowing that on that day, I was the fastest
cyclist in the world. That’s why I do it. I’m not going to be the Sports
Personality of the Year in a rush, am I?” “ B u t you must have been peeved
that you weren’t at least nominated?” I ask.
“A lot of people have said that ... and of course it would have been nice to
have been chosen in the top 10, and I think I qualified in terms of
performance and achievement, but as I said, it’s not down to ...”
“Achievement?” I suggest. “Yes, and that’s fine because I know what I did last
year; I know I was unbeatable on the world stage but I’m still a track
cyclist so ...”
“You accept it?” “Yes.” “It still seems unjust,” I suggest.
“There’s nothing I can do about it,” she replies.
“Maybe there is,” I say, smiling. “What about a famous boyfriend?”
“Yeah,” she smiles, “that’s probably my best chance, a famous boyfriend, but I
don’t really socialise in those circles ... I should have given Lewis
Hamilton my number yesterday at the Sports Journalists’ Association awards.”
“Do you have a boyfriend?” “Not at the moment, no.” “So he has a chance then?”
“Yeah, but I think I’m too old for him and not glamorous enough.”
“I don’t know,” I reply. “Hasn’t he been photographed with Naomi Campbell? She
must be giving you at least 10 years.”
“Yeah, but she’s a super-model,” she observes. “How could he turn her down?
Could you? Naomi Campbell! Blimey!”
“What if you missed three dope tests?” I suggest. “That would surely earn you
an invite from the BBC?”
“No, that would be awful.” “Have you missed any?” “There was one. I don’t even
know if I should mention this but ... the dope control officer came to my
flat but didn’t read the instructions I provided to the security code to my
gate, and which buzzer to press to contact me, and he gave me a strike. I
appealed instantly and it was subsequently revoked because they knew it was
their error but it was very frustrating ... I mean, if you fill out the form
to the best of your ability, the least you expect from the dope control
officer is that he is going to read it.”
“When did this happen?” “It was when they (the UK sport random tests)
basically started ... but I’ve been doing them for the UCI (cycling’s
governing body) for years. I think it’s something you have to accept and
consider as part of your job if you want to compete in drug-free sport. It
sucks in terms of the constraints sometimes when you might change plans and
have to text them that you have changed location ... but that’s not going to
kill you, is it? Not for the sake of making sport in the world cleaner.”
“So you are mindful of your responsibilities?”
“Absolutely; it’s part of your job now; and if you are an athlete going into
sport and you are not prepared to accept that, you should do something else.”
Cycling Weekly – or “the comic” as it is disrespectfully but affectionately
known – is an institution for club cyclists. They like to grumble about it
but everyone reads it ... My wife derides it as my ‘bike porn’. Each week I
devour it like candy. – Matt Seaton, author of Two Wheels.
DOING something else has never been an option for Pendleton. The younger of
two girls, she was born with a twin brother, Alex, into a cycling-mad home
and was taught to pedal as soon as she could walk. The source of the madness
was her father, Max, a talented amateur from Hertfordshire who had achieved
the ultimate honour – the cover of Cycling Weekly – several times during his
career. Max loved cycling and imparted this love to his kids. When Victoria
was six, he fixed wooden blocks to the pedals at the back of his tandem and
introduced her to the joys of youth hostel-ling. Her first vivid smell was
the waft of his wintergreen. Every Sunday, she would accompany him to the
races. Every July, he would explain the Tour de France. When she was nine,
she was entered for her first race – 400m on the grass at Fordham.
He told her that she was great, “You’ll be the next Beryl Burton,” he enthused
. . . when the person she most wanted to be was her Mum, Paula.
Victoria adored her mother and often dressed in Paula’s favourite frocks and
shoes, imagining herself as Cinderella at the ball. But there was no
escaping the Max in her veins. It surfaced as a competitive rage with her
brother, Alex: “He had to have speech lessons because I used to speak on his
behalf.”
It surfaced when she captained the hockey team at school: “I was so aggressive
at times and would often lose my voice.” It surfaced on sports days when she
raced against boys: “Not many of the boys liked me because I tried so hard
to beat them.” Yes, Victoria Pendleton was her father’s daughter all right.
She just wasn’t ready to accept it. “All through my teens I wanted to defy
him,” she says.
She never envisaged a life as a professional athlete and she had no idea that
her life was about to change when Marshal Thomas, the assistant national
track coach, phoned one afternoon in 1996 and invited her to Manchester for
a trial. It was her first time to sprint around the steep curves of the
velodrome and, 16 years old, she was hooked on the buzz.
Five years later, she raced in her first European championships and lost in
the bronze-medal race on her debut at the 2002 Commonwealth Games. She hated
the experience: “I had no idea about tactics and felt completely out of my
depth. It scared me. I thought, ‘I’m going to look a complete wally out
there’.”
Battle-hardened and keen, she finished fourth the 2003 world championships and
again the following year, and it felt even worse. “Fourth place wasn’t good
enough for me,” she explains. “I didn’t want to be fourth again; I didn’t
want to be ‘quite’ good, ‘almost’ good or ‘just not’ good enough. If fourth
in the world was the best that I could do, then I would find something that
I was better at.”
The 2004 Athens Olympics provided Pendleton with her shot at redemption. She
travelled to the Games hopeful of making the podium but awoke on the morning
of the sprint qualifying rounds and completely froze. “I felt like I was in
a dream,” she says, “and that I wasn’t really there. I couldn’t push myself
hard enough; I couldn’t feel it; it was like nothing I had ever experienced
before. I blame myself for putting the pressure on. People were talking
about me as a medal chance and I had set my mind on it and when I didn’t,
even vaguely win a medal, I was devastated. It was hard. I nearly quit. I
honestly thought that I couldn’t deal with it; I just cried for about three
days.”
Steve Peters, the psychiatrist who works with the British team, slowly
unravelled the knots and sent her to the beach. “If it wasn’t for Steve I
don’t think I’d be cycling today,” she says. “I had no faith in myself,
absolutely none, but he encouraged me to see past it and use it as
experience.”
Eight months later, in March 2005, she travelled to Los Ange-les and won her
first world championships title in the sprint. It should have felt like the
greatest day of her life but when she looks back now, she’s not sure. “It
was a strange sensation,” she recalls. “I was pleased obviously and thought
that I deserved it but I didn’t really feel that . . . proud.”
“How do you explain that?” “I don’t know,” she says. “I almost felt that it
was lucky, and that maybe I had won because I’d had a lucky day and everyone
else had had a bad one, which is a bit ridiculous I guess.”
In 2006, after winning the World Cup and a gold medal at the Commonwealth
Games in Melbourne, she then travelled to Bordeaux to defend her world title
but just came up short in the final and finished in second place to the
Belarussian, Natallia Tsylinskaya.
A new coach, the former German star Jan van Eijden, was drafted onto the team
to shake her up. She won three gold medals at the 2007 world championships
in Mallorca and raced with a confidence she had never experienced before. “I
really felt like I was going to win,” she says, “and winning three kind of
proves that it can’t have been just luck.”
On your allegiance we’ve a stronger claim; We charge you yield, we charge
you yield in Queen Victoria’s name! – The Pirates of Penzance
PENDLETON’S reign as the undisputed Queen of track sprinting has entered
its 10th month now. She has made her debut on Question of Sport, signed
sponsorship deals with adidas and Oakley and joined the same management team
(Professional Sports Partnerships) as Sir Matthew Pinsent and Sue Barker.
“I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the couple of weeks of craziness,” she smiles, “but
don’t get me wrong; I’m not suddenly some diva being driven around in a
chauffeured limousine, but it’s unusual I guess for a track cyclist to get
such recognition and I am very appreciative of it.”
After a short Christmas break, she resumes training in Manchester this week,
where she will defend her three titles at the world championships in March,
but it’s the sprint race in Beijing – the only Olympic cycling sprint event
– that will define her sporting year.
“It sucks that the one event I am allowed to race in is the riskiest of them
all,” she says. “If it was like swimming, and there were seven different
sprint events I would do them all – I hope [Michael] Phelps realises how
lucky he is.”
“Yes, that kind of raises the stakes for you,” I concur.
“There’s not a lot I can do about it,” she says. “All I can do is prepare as
well as I can.”
“Does your experience in Athens make that harder?” I ask. “Has that scar fully
healed?”
“I think so. Athens was pretty awful but I learnt a lot from it and I feel
that I am looking towards Beijing in a whole different way. I want to make
the most of it and enjoy being part of the whole Olympic experience, because
I didn’t do that in Athens.”
“So what’s the goal?” I ask. “To be the best at something– it’s all that I
have ever wanted since I was a child, to be really good at something, better
than everyone else, and this is my opportunity.”
“But you are the best,” I counter. “You have already achieved that.”
“But it’s never enough, is it?” she says. “You always want more.”
“So what’s enough?” “An Olympic gold medal or two would be nice,” she says,
smiling.
“I will obviously have to wait four years to try and achieve that but I think
that would be enough. That would make me . . . well, no, it probably
wouldn’t make me happy but you know what I mean.”
Yes, your majesty.
The fame game
Despite picking up the 2007 Sunday Times Sportswoman of the Year award in
November, Pendleton, astonishingly, did not even go on to make the shortlist
for the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award. ‘You have to be realistic.
I’d love to be more famous, have lots of people supporting me, people
knowing my name, but I need a tennis racket, or a golf club, or to play
football. Being a female I don’t stand a chance,’ she says
Victorian times: Pendleton’s ride to gold
- Victoria Pendleton was born in Bedfordshire on September 24, 1980
- Her interest in cycling began by watching her father Max compete in various
events. She began cycle racing by competing with her twin brother Alex on
local grass tracks at the age of nine
- Pendleton showed her promise at the age of 13 and three years later was
spotted by Marshal Thomas, the assistant national track coach. However, she
wanted to concentrate on her education
- After completing her A levels at school, she studied a BSc (Hons) degree in
Sport and Exercise Science at the University of Northumbria
- She decided to pursue track cycling after watching Jason Queally win an
Olympic gold medal on the track in the Sydney Games in 2000 n She spent two
seasons at the World Cycling Centre in Aigle, Switzerland, where she was
coached by Frederic Magne, a seven-time world champion
- Pendleton won four silver medals at the British track championships in 2001
- In 2002, she qualifi ed for England’s Commonwealth Games team and finished
fourth in the sprint. She was fourth in the sprint at the 2003 world
championships in Stuttgart and the 2004 world championships in Melbourne
- At the Olympic Games in 2004, Pendleton was devastated after finishing sixth
in the time trial and ninth in the 200m sprint and contemplated quitting the
sport. She said inexperience had played a big part in her poor performances
- She won a gold medal in the sprint at the 2005 world championships, becoming
only the third British woman cycling world champion in 40 years
- At the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, she won silver in the 500m time
trial and gold in the sprint. Also that year, she set a national 200m record
of 11.037sec
- Last year’s UCI track world championships provided her with the big
breakthrough. She won gold in the team sprint with Shanaze Reade, individual
gold in the women’s sprint, and gold in the Keirin. She also won the 500m
event at the World Cup with a time of 34.070sec – more than four seconds
less than her best in 2000 when she started out in major competitions
- She is a favourite to win Olympic gold in Beijing
- Pendleton’s interests outside of cycling are dress making, drawing and
baking
