The affair that nearly destroyed Queen Victoria: Pendleton reveals how her love for her coach cost him his job, sparked her teammates' fury and led to her decision to QUIT cycling after the Games
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Victoria Pendleton, pictured during a glossy magazine shoot, has always been set apart from her fellow competitors because of her love heels, make-up and fashion
Victoria Pendleton is by her own estimation, and that of others who know about professional cycling, too small, too slender, too feminine — ‘girlie’ is the word she uses — to do what she does even competently, let alone competitively.
‘Physically,’ she says, ‘I haven’t got what it takes.’
She is also regarded by many as temperamentally unsuited to her sport: too vulnerable, too melodramatic.
This makes the fact that she does what she does as well as she does seem almost incredible.
Her competitors are, without exception, bigger, bulkier and more aggressive than her, and yet Pendleton is world and Olympic champion, winner of a freakish nine world titles over almost a decade at the top.
The only way she can explain her astonishing success is that she has a ‘shedload of tenacity’. She simply tries harder, pushes herself further, and wants to win more than her opponents.
For anyone, like me, who would hesitate to describe himself as a cycling aficionado, a brief explanation: Victoria Pendleton is a track cyclist, a sprinter.
She competes inside a velodrome, where she makes circuits of a steep-sided track at implausible speeds, in one of those skintight leotards and a sci-fi helmet.
At London 2012, she is competing in three events, including the individual sprint, for which she won gold at Beijing in 2008.
Though she was effectively disqualified from her first event on Thursday, Pendleton won gold last night in the keirin event, and goes for gold again on Tuesday.
‘I go round and round in circles, really, really fast, on a big wooden bowl,’ she says to me, almost in wonder at the ridiculousness of it.
‘I turn left for a living,’ she deadpans.
‘Pointless’ is a word she uses more than once to describe what she does, and she is certainly ambivalent about her time as a cyclist — a period that encompasses her entire adult life to date but will come to a close next week, when she will retire, comparatively early, as world and Olympic champion.
She desperately wanted to win in London — but after that she wants to stop and do something completely different.
Pendleton is scaldingly honest about her reasons for quitting.
I’d gathered from some of her previous interviews that she is candid and occasionally outspoken, and from footage of her competing that she is easily upset, but I wasn’t expecting to meet someone so disheartened.
The British Olympic track cyclist Victoria pictured with her fiance and sports-performance scientist Scott Gardner
Her impending retirement has nothing to do with her physical condition: her decision is informed, she tells me carefully, by politics.
‘Some of my working relationships [with Team GB staff] are not as strong or amicable as they once were, or as I would need them to be to continue,’ she says.
There is a sense that, the cycling apart, she has never had much in common with many of her fellow cyclists.
She likes fashion and spends money on contemporary art. At home, she has a wardrobe full of fabric waiting for the Olympics to be over, at which point she intends to get busy with her sewing machine.
The most rapturous I hear her is describing the feeling of wearing an Alexander McQueen dress for a photo shoot. ‘I like heels and make-up,’ she says.
Pendleton, to hear her talk about it, has always had a conflicted relationship with her job. Her talent, she intimates, is both a gift and a curse. ‘All I’ve ever wanted to be is really good at something,’ she tells me.
Surely, you don’t need to be the best in the world at something to have value as a person? Don’t you know you’re lovely as you are?
‘I know,’ she says. ‘But no one ever says that, though, do they?’
An emotional Miss Pendleton poses with her gold medal after winning the Keirin event last night
Pendleton can’t remember the first time she got on a bike — but she does remember clearly the first time she rode without stabilisers, her dad racing along behind her holding on to her saddle, then letting go.
It was, she recognised even then, a significant moment of father-daughter bonding.
‘It was important to him,’ she says. ‘And it was important to me because it was important to him.’
Cycling was Max Pendleton’s life — he became a national champion. He worked as a chef because it was easy to fit the job around his training schedule. (He now runs a property management company.)
Max and his wife Pauline, who worked as a book-keeper for a local shop, had a daughter first, Nicola, and then twins, Alex and Vicky. They lived in Stotfold, in Bedfordshire.
All three children were introduced to competitive cycling early, but only one stuck at it. Vicky was the child with the most promise, but also perhaps the one least prepared to disappoint her father.
If she had declined to continue taking cycling seriously, she says, it would have been ‘massively upsetting to my dad’.
She was nine when she first competed, around 14 when her father realised quite how extraordinarily talented she was. He pushed her hard.
‘He’d take me on quite challenging routes, and he’d say: “If you don’t get over this hill we won’t get home.” And then he’d cycle off and leave me.’ By then it wasn’t just Max pushing her: she pushed herself.
‘I don’t like giving up,’ she says. ‘I hate it. I don’t want to let myself down, and I don’t want to let anyone else down.’
Success in cycling, Pendleton adds, is about the ability to tolerate physical pain: ‘It’s how much you’re willing to hurt yourself. How much pain you can deal with before you take your foot off and say: “I can’t go on.” ’
She repeats the words in a fake whiny voice: ‘I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. It sounds so weak! I’d rather drop dead off my bike.’
More than once, she says, she has pushed herself so hard that she passed out. She tells me this with some pride. Her father’s daughter, and something more.
‘The idea of being mediocre is, to me, just uuuurgh,’ she says.
Sadly, despite her huge success and her father’s pride in it, Max and Vicky are no longer close. It’s a familiar sports story: the father who coaches his daughter to early success but then is forced to step back as her talent takes her far beyond his capabilities.
‘The further I’ve got in my career, his input into what I do has become less and less, and our relationship has become further and further apart,’ is how she puts it.
Having gone to study at Northumbria University while she trained hard for three years, Pendleton was eventually selected for the 2004 Olympics in Athens.
‘I honestly left the Beijing Olympics feeling like I’d committed a crime — like I’d killed somebody.’
She came sixth and ninth in her events, went home and contemplated a future without cycling.
But she was convinced to keep going, and in 2005 became world champion.
‘That was massive,’ she says. ‘It was a huge feeling of acceptance, like: “I’m good enough to hang out with [her British teammates] now.” ’
Between then and Beijing in 2008, Pendleton was supreme. She went to Beijing as favourite, and of the eight gold medals won by Britain, Pendleton’s in the sprint was among the most convincing.
In the final, she destroyed her constant adversary, the Australian Anna Meares — with whom she is doing battle three times in London this week.
Still, you won’t be surprised to hear that her reaction to becoming Olympic champion was more conflicted than that of most other world-beating athletes.
She has watched the medal ceremony on video. ‘I tried to feel something but I couldn’t,’ she says. ‘It didn’t feel like it was happening. I was smiling at one point but then the national anthem started and I thought, “You can’t laugh through the national anthem, that’s treason!”’ It was, she knows, a strange non-reaction to the realisation of a life’s ambition.
But something else happened in Beijing that changed everything.
In the run-up to the Olympics, Pendleton had fallen in love with Scott Gardner, who was then the British cycling team’s sports scientist — the expert data analyst who works with the coaching team to help athletes maximise their potential. Which was wonderful, of course, but also, she says, ‘disgustingly unprofessional’.
A relationship would be a conflict of interest and likely to prove controversial with Pendleton’s fellow competitors.
Before they did anything about their mutual attraction, Pendleton and Gardner, a phlegmatic Aussie, discussed what to do about it in agonising detail.
Winning the gold for Great Britain: Miss Pendleton is pictured in the lead in her red helmet last night
The winner steals a kiss from her fiance Mr Gardner at the London 2012 Olympic Games at the Velodrome
‘It was the most awkward thing I’ve ever had to do,’ she tells me. ‘We hadn’t even gone on a date.’
But the fact was that if they went public with their putative relationship — and they are not, she says, the kind of people to lie about it — then one of them would have to leave the team. And it would have to be him, since she couldn’t compete for another nation.
But what if the relationship didn’t work out? Then he’d have left for no reason. Gardner was prepared to take that chance.
When they told the team coaches they were starting to see each other romantically outside work, they were told to keep quiet until after the Games so as not to disrupt the team’s preparations.
But as soon as the races were over, Pendleton says, ‘the s**t hit the fan, and what should have been the happiest moment of my life turned out to be the most hideous.’
Later, she tells me: ‘I honestly left the Olympics feeling like I’d committed a crime — like I’d killed somebody.’
Back in the UK, with Scott Gardner gone from the team, Pendleton says she became something of a pariah.
‘Some people reacted very negatively,’ she says. Not all, she’s keen to stress, but a number of her coaches and team-mates were furious that they could no longer work with Gardner. People made disparaging comments about both of them.
‘It was tough,’ she says. ‘Shocking, painful and uncomfortable. It hurt.’
From 2009 until the beginning of this year, Pendleton’s form slumped.
‘People say that as a sportsperson, you shouldn’t reveal your weaknesses, that you shouldn’t come across as vulnerable. But I am vulnerable, and I am emotional. What’s wrong with that? As long as my legs are faster than the other girls’, it doesn’t matter.’
‘I cried a lot that year,’ she says of 2009, her first year as Olympic champion — the year she was awarded an MBE and her fame transcended cycling, bringing her lucrative endorsements, magazine covers and promotional work.
In 2010, she thinks that people on the team softened towards her somewhat; but then last year she had a terrible time.
In 2010, she thinks that people on the team softened towards her somewhat; but then last year she had a terrible time.
Her parents had split in 2009 and their separation became, in Pendleton’s own words, increasingly ugly.
Then she injured her back, making training more difficult. At the world championships in Poland, she could manage only bronze. It was, she says, a disaster.
But one good thing came of it: the British cycling bosses agreed to rehire Gardner, now her fiancé, as her personal coach. It seems to have worked. Just in time for the Olympics, her performances dramatically improved.
Of course, it has always been the case that the most exciting sports stars are the heart-on-their-sleeves mavericks who teeter on the edge of disaster, cursing themselves and their sports, before producing a sublime moment of skill.
It’s the choice between Borg and McEnroe. Do you want efficiency, robotic get-the-job-done competence, or do you want Vicky Pendleton, with her fragile temperament, her propensity for blubbing on the track, her angst and her by-the-skin-of-her-teeth victories?
‘People say that as a sportsperson, you shouldn’t reveal your weaknesses,’ she says. ‘That you shouldn’t come across as vulnerable.
'But I am vulnerable, and I am emotional. What’s wrong with that? As long as my legs are faster than the other girls’, it doesn’t matter.’
Getting ready in her Olympic 2012 kit, pictured left, and showing off her glamorous side in a Pantene advert
At one point, we discuss the image of her as an emotionally unstable person. She says she’s just honest, and that sometimes that honesty can make her seem odd, given that other sportspeople are so relentlessly banal in their public pronouncements.
I think she’s right about that. But clearly she is something of a drama queen. She’s complicated. And as a result, she’s utterly compelling.
Happily, she had what it takes for one last glorious hurrah before she turns her back on her sport for good.
‘When I was in Melbourne [for the world championships in April] being jeered by the home crowd, I thought: “Just you wait until we get to London. Just you wait.”’
Now, who knows? She’s going to marry Scott (they live together in Cheshire with their two Dobermanns).
They might think about kids, but she wants to live her own life for a bit first.
She’s 31. It’ll be fascinating to see what she does next.
But first there’s the matter of this Olympics. This time she promises she’s going to celebrate properly.
- The full interview appeared in the August issue of Esquire. The September issue is on sale now. Also available as a digital edition
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2183465/The-affair-nearly-destroyed-Queen-Victoria-Pendleton-reveals-love-coach-cost-job-sparked-teammates-fury-led-decision-QUIT-cycling-Games.html#ixzz22WuscxnV