Victoria Pendleton: I won’t be pressured into having a baby
Lead from the heart, not the head PRINCESS DIANA
Suicidal thoughts. A torturous divorce. And retiring from the sport she loved. Olympic champion Victoria Pendleton on putting her traumatic past behind her, and why, at 40, she’s finally doing things her way. . .
FORTY. It’s a watershed age and Victoria Pendleton — one of our greatest ever female Olympians — can’t quite work out what reaching the milestone means to her.
Is she having a belated episode of adolescent defiance, denied to her in her teens because she was so fiercely committed to sport? Or has retirement from competitive cycling precipitated a midlife crisis?
Whichever it is, Pendleton, who had the clean-cut aura of a 1950s prom queen during her cycling career, is now more rock chic than high school ingénue.
She sports several flamboyant tattoos — a Medusa head, a galloping horse and a deer’s skull among them — and plans more. ‘Two full sleeves of them, at least,’ she promises.
‘But will you wish you hadn’t got them when you’re 85?’ I cry. ‘A
lady at Ascot asked me that,’ she laughs. ‘ But when you’re 85 you don’t care. You’re opinionated, and say: “Mind your own business!” ’
Her hair, pale lilac today, has been through the gamut of rainbow shades and more. ‘ Blue, pink, purple, turquoise . . . I bought some colours online and change it up a bit,’ she says.
She celebrated her milestone birthday in September by driving an Aston Martin to a castle in Scotland (she’d hired it for a big bash which became, because of Covid restrictions, a party for four) while dressed, James Bond-style, in a tuxedo and bow-tie.
And then there are the motorbikes. A brace of them. Today she’s togged out in head-to-toe black: snood, biker jacket and boots, plus full-face helmet with visor. (‘The safest way to travel. I have my own PPE!’ she smiles.)
A year on from her divorce from Scott Gardner (a sports scientist, formerly with the Great Britain cycling team), she also has a newish boyfriend she met several months ago on a blind date.
‘Maybe I’m having my belated teenage rebellion or perhaps a midlife crisis at 40,’ she agrees, laughing. ‘I feel it’s taken me quite a long time to break free from doing what I felt obliged to do.
‘I’ve tried very hard to be a good role model for so many years. I’m not saying I’m a bad one now, but I’m free to follow my dreams. You sacrifice a lot to get to the top in sport. Everything else is put on hold: family; friends; the freedom to do what you want when you want.’
Nine times world champion track cyclist, she also carried off a gold medal at Beijing in 2008 and won both a gold and silver at the London Olympics in 2012 before she retired, aged 32, that year.
Life behind the garlands and the public approbation has, at times, been almost unbearably hard, however. And not just because of the Herculean physical demands of elite sport.
Pendleton, who says she has a ‘fragile psyche’, has always been prone to depression, and in 2018 it became life-threatening.
She had undertaken an expedition to climb Everest with TV adventurer Ben Fogle but had to return to base camp after suffering from severe hypoxia (oxygen deprivation), which she later learned is a trigger for depression. And her marriage was crumbling.
‘I was diagnosed with severe depression and prescribed quite a lot of medication,’ she said shortly after. ‘Antidepressants, beta blockers, tranquillisers and sleeping tablets. But it didn’t suit me, wasn’t helping me feel myself, so I went cold turkey.’
It was then that she reached a nadir. She stockpiled the pills, ready to take an overdose and was ‘minutes’ away from doing so early one morning.
Instead, she picked up the phone to an old friend, Great Britain cycling team psychiatrist Steve Peters, who talked her out of it.
Rather than going to a clinic, she agreed to stay with her mum, Pauline. Since then, her recovery has been steady. Now, back living in her own home, a converted barn in Oxfordshire, she seems upbeat.
‘I’m more aware of the indications of depression now: feeling unmotivated, uninspired, pessimistic,’ she says when we meet. ‘I wondered whether I’d drop down, because the isolation of the pandemic pushes everyone to the limit. At my lowest, I was most grateful for the support and helping hands of friends and family. But when no one can see you’re struggling . . . ’
Her voice tails off, then she picks up. ‘But I’m quicker to act now on anything that makes me feel that way. I know there will be tough times, highs and lows; times when I can crack on and be positive and times when I’m at the other extreme of the spectrum.
‘I live with the knowledge that depression may happen at any time, but I’m more prepared to deal with it now. That’s the difference.’ How does she contend with it? ‘I do something that gives me joy!’ she cries. ‘I bake a cake. I get out on my motorbike. Go for a walk. Lockdown made us all aware of how clean the air suddenly was.’ (She is now supporting the Change the Weather campaign — a clean air initiative by energy firm E.ON, encouraging people to cycle or walk.)
Victoria also rides, and owns two retired racehorses, having trained and successfully competed as an amateur jockey, notably finishing fifth in the Foxhunter Chase at Cheltenham in 2016. At the time she was euphoric. But the black dog of depression lurked.
‘I’ve always had low spells. A lot of people in my family have experienced anxiety and depression. My older sister Nicola, my dad — both of them suffer at times from extreme stress.’ But not Victoria’s twin brother Alex. ‘ No, we’re yin and yang,’ she laughs. ‘He doesn’t take life too seriously.’
Her new man — she won’t name him — is doubtless another reason for her current buoyant mood. They spent the first lockdown ‘very happily’ together, although they do not permanently live together.
Neither had she been actively seeking a partner when she met him. She roars with laughter when I mention a Tinder account I spotted in her name. ‘It was a fake!’ she cries.
‘After my divorce I’d reached a point — though it took me a while — where I was quite happy by myself. I was independent. I didn’t have to keep anyone else happy. I’d got lots of outrageous hobbies.’
She took up sky-diving, and last summer got her accelerated freefall licence ‘just for fun’.
‘Society makes us feel we need another special person to make us feel complete, but I wasn’t even looking for a boyfriend. Then a friend of a friend set me up on a blind date. And I thought: “There’s no harm in it.” We went for some food at my local pub and that was the start.’
I’m asking her for clues now. What does he do? ‘I can’t tell you that because it’s something so obscure it would identify him immediately!’ she says.
‘He isn’t famous and he’s not in sport. When you’re an athlete, it’s difficult for other people to relate to you — why would you put sport first, before everything else? It’s not that you don’t care about them. You
‘I live with the knowledge depression may happen at any time, but I’m more prepared to deal with it now’