Victoria Pendleton has confessed to a bout of Beijing blues after she won the Olympic gold medal in the women’s sprint track cycling event. As she prepares for the World Championships in Poland this month, the 28-year-old is one of the few athletes ready to talk of the illogical sense of loss that came with fulfilling a lifelong ambition at last summer’s Games.

For some Olympic champions, it seems, the winning smiles after the massive highs of Beijing are hiding an unspeakable low. The sense of anti-climax compared to that experienced by some newlyweds, Pendleton said: “You have all this build-up for one day, and when it’s over, it’s: ‘Oh, is that it?’ You’re relieved but kind of sad and numb. It’s over.”

Pendleton was part of a Great Britain track cycling team that dominated the velodrome in Beijing, winning gold medals in seven out of ten events. She said that certain team-mates suffered more than she did. “I don’t want to mention names, but I’ve heard about people, on the grapevine, that struggled,” she said. “We had cleaned up at the World Championships and all we had was expectation to replicate our performance. The pressure was enormous. When I won, the overwhelming emotion was absolute relief, like: ‘Phew, I’m glad that’s over.’ ”

Her post-Games slump is perhaps more surprising considering that she had overcome the disappointment of failing to make the podium in Athens in 2004, after which she had come close to giving up the sport altogether. It seems that success was as difficult to cope with as failure.

“People think it’s hard when you lose,” she said. “But it’s almost easier to come second because you have something to aim for when you finish. When you win, you suddenly feel lost.”

She threw herself into training but still found motivation hard. “I was going through the motions,” she said. “It was a lot tougher than I expected to find the drive. The Olympics blows everything away because it is so big.”

Pendleton will defend her sprint and team sprint titles at the World Championships and take on the keirin, in which she won silver last year in Manchester. One notable absentee, though, will be Rebecca Romero, who won gold in the individual pursuit in Beijing and also admitted to a sense of anticlimax afterwards. She has yet to return to competition.

Steve Peters, the cycling team’s psychiatrist, said that some Olympic champions — and even the support staff behind them — became depressed at adjusting to reality after Beijing. “This is true not just in cycling but across the sports I’ve worked with,” he said. “A number of people I’ve been in touch with following the Olympics, people who’d succeeded, said the same. They felt quite depressed, almost like a sense of loss.”

The reaction is natural, according to Mark Bawden, the lead performance psychologist at the English Institute of Sport. “To win an Olympic gold is a life-changing moment, but then there is a crash back to reality,” he said. “It can be as powerful an experience to come down from success as coping with adversity.”

Perhaps because of its sensitive nature, there is little scientific research on a phenomenon that sports psychologists call post-competition depression. Olympic athletes are particularly susceptible because of the long build-up to a Games and the relatively tiny window to achieve success.

Few are willing to discuss it publicly. Ian Crocker, the American swimmer, admitted to taking antidepressants for a year after his first Olympic gold medal, in Sydney. But it is becoming less of a taboo subject as the mental side of sport becomes a central com-ponent of all elite athletes’ training regimes.

Even those dispensing the advice are not immune as Ben Chell, the Britain sailing team’s psychologist, learnt. “I had warned the sailors about the potential sense of loss afterwards but I didn’t have any strategy for myself,” he said. “I thought I’d be excited when I came back but I wasn’t exactly full of the joys of spring. I found it really hard and became quite introspective about my life. It took me about four months to re-energise.”