It is not easy to pigeonhole Victoria Pendleton. She is a born cyclist, but not a natural one. She is keen to don a pair of heels for a photo shoot but would hate to be called a pin-up. She is confident and outspoken, yet, as the Tour de France caravan rolls into London, too timid to knock the professional arm of her sport that drags her and every cyclist through the mire of drugs.

Pendleton, 26, is an obvious choice to front the 2012 Dream Stats roadshow in Hyde Park this weekend that aims to capture the imagination of another successful generation of cyclists and yet her Olympic memories are scars on her sporting persona that she cannot hide.

Born in Stotfold, Hertfordshire, Pendleton’s earliest sporting memories are of cycling “for as long as I can remember”.

“Dad’s been taking us to road and track races,” she said as she rolled back the clock two decades in her parents’ house, where she grew up. “We used to wait for him in the rain or in the car for him to come past.”

Pendleton’s father, Max, was the focus then and the starting point for Victoria and her siblings to try the sport that he so loved. But the real inspiration came from her twin brother, Alex.

“The fact that I had a twin brother – I always saw myself as an equal – that made me competitive,” Pendleton said. “He was always stronger and faster and better technically, but he didn’t have the desire. Maybe that’s my fault. Maybe I spoilt it for him. The winning thing doesn’t mean as much to him.”

But her brother was not the only benchmark for the young athlete. “I used to do the grass-track races, but there was never an event for the girls so I used to sprint-race the boys,” she said. “Sometimes they’d give me a handicap start – then I knew it was in the bag. I used to earn loads of money, sometimes 30 quid in a weekend, which was more than some paper round.”

It was not long before the cycling establishment came knocking. “I got talent-spotted and went to Manchester, but it was very part-time,” Pendleton said. “There wasn’t the facilities we have now and no money. I didn’t know anyone my age doing my event [the sprint] and there were only three women who had ever done it in this country. The coach kept ringing every couple of weeks hassling me, but I wanted to do my GCSEs and then my A levels and then my degree.”

But like so many Olympians of the future, one hour in front of the television changed it all. “In 2000, I watched Jason Queally and was blown away by it,” Pendleton said. “In my final year at university I got a grant and travelled to Manchester five days a month. My improvement was really rapid, it was so rewarding. Then I spent seven weeks training and that was enough for the [2002] Commonwealth Games team. My dad was over the moon. He’d been telling me I had potential, but that’s his job, isn’t it? He’s my dad. I don’t think I listened to him in that respect.”

The hesitant athlete so sure that she did not have what it took to be a performer on the world stage then made a decision that betrayed her real qualities. “I got a place at the World Cycling Centre in Switzerland,” she said. “It’s normally for the developing nations, but I qualified because we didn’t have a sprint coach here. I had a programme that ran from 7.30am until 9pm. In the first week I thought I was going to die.”

Pendleton stayed for 18 months and spent two punishing winters on the programme. “In 2002, I had been knocked out in the first round of the Worlds – a year later I was fourth. A few people said to me, ‘You haven’t been taking anything, have you?’ I’d changed that much.”

But the route to success was about to take a nasty turn. “I left the programme just before the [2004] Olympics in Athens,” Pendleton said. “I really wanted to be part of the GB team. I thought I’d made the right decision, but afterwards the coaches said if I’d stayed in Switzerland I’d have done better in Athens.

“I underestimated how difficult it would be,” she said. “I was a little machine after Switzerland, but I began to get anxious about my form. I’d finished fourth at the Worlds and people were talking of a medal. My worst fault is I hate disappointing people – I let it all get out of proportion and it bit me in the bum.”

Pendleton finished sixth in the time-trial and ninth in the sprint event, but out of the fire of her disappointment came the champion she has so quickly become. She won her first world medal in 2005, a gold in Los Angeles. In 2006, came double Commonwealth gold in Melbourne and, seemingly not content with that, she won three gold medals at the track World Championships in Spain earlier this year.

The woman who had been on the brink of giving up the sport at the end of 2004, has transformed herself and we may just be watching an Olympic champion in the making. Pendleton will be appearing at the London 2012 roadshow in Hyde Park today, when she will be urging the public to try the National Lottery Dream Stats calculator.

To find out which sport suits you, visit national-lottery.co.uk/dreamstats