{"id":664290,"date":"2026-05-12T11:01:13","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T11:01:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/664290\/"},"modified":"2026-05-12T11:01:13","modified_gmt":"2026-05-12T11:01:13","slug":"i-was-severely-depressed-i-felt-id-failed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/664290\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I was severely depressed. I felt I\u2019d failed\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

The east London photographic studio is a silent, empty, echoey cavern when Victoria Pendleton, one of Britain\u2019s most famous Olympic cyclists, walks in alone and early. Dame Laura Kenny has since overtaken her haul of Olympic cycling<\/a> medals, but Pendleton \u2014 who won a gold at Beijing 2008, a gold and a silver at London 2012, and was appointed MBE and CBE \u2014 was and remains the OG poster girl for British female cycling. She was among the first female athletes to be honest about the toll Olympic competition took on her mental health. She self-harmed and felt isolated and bullied. One coach told her to develop more c*** in her, spelling it out rather than saying it, as if that somehow softened the message.<\/p>\n

These days, aged 45 and 14 years post-retirement, gone are the sparkly sandals and miniskirts Pendleton used to wear, although she is still reminiscent of a model from the Sixties, a look that had her picking her brand deals (Hovis dressed her up convincingly as Audrey Hepburn; she looked dynamite on Strictly<\/a>). Today, she is dressed entirely in black: bomber jacket, shirt, capri pants and boots that mean business, clumpy-heeled and platformed, zipped up around her delicate ankles. Her fingers are adorned by silver rings \u2014 the edgy indie kind. She is covered in tattoos.<\/p>\n

\"NINTCHDBPICT001079835280\"\u201cI was often cornered into being painted as quite tragic, a damsel in distress, and it could be quite demeaning\u201ddan kennedy for the times magazinE<\/p>\n

\u201cThis place,\u201d she says, looking around the studio. \u201cI\u2019ve been here before. It\u2019s a bit triggering. I think I was here being photographed naked on a bike.\u201d I know the image she means: March 2008, five months before the Beijing Olympics, when all eyes were on her. She had not an ounce of fat on her butt and legs. It ran on the cover of a magazine with the line \u201cVictoria Pendleton: one cyclist with nothing to hide\u201d. There were other covers \u2014 lads\u2019 mags, upmarket men\u2019s mags \u2014 but unlike in that image, her back muscles were often airbrushed out. \u201cI was happy when I was in control,\u201d she says. \u201cI didn\u2019t mind swimwear or sporty underwear, but if they brought out frilly see-through lingerie, I\u2019d say no.\u201d<\/p>\n

She retells all this in the manner of \u201canother woman, another lifetime\u201d.<\/p>\n

Today that extraordinary Olympic body of hers is rangy and petite, no longer bulked up by rigorous training and the vast amounts of chicken and protein she used to consume \u2014 and would make her gag \u2014 as part of her strength-building regime. She runs in the Dorset forest every day, works out in her own gym in an outhouse with her partner of five years, the former SBS soldier Louis Tinsley, and she still rides \u2014 all of this on her own terms. Pendleton pushed that body to breaking point for British Cycling and for Team GB between the ages of 18 and 32. Like all young Olympians, she sacrificed any kind of anonymous normality in which to grow up \u2014 parties, booze, dating.<\/p>\n

\"NINTCHDBPICT001079835275\"The tattoo on her chest is a tribute to her late twin brother, Alexdan kennedy for the times magazinE<\/p>\n

To show for it, she says, she has her life today. With the aid of a lot of therapy, she can finally see that for all that pain and sacrifice \u2014 by no means just physical \u2014 her Olympic career has given her financial stability and long-term happiness with Tinsley. She met him in 2019 through an SAS instructor\u2019s introduction after appearing on Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins for Stand Up to Cancer. It followed a very painful divorce from her husband, Scott Gardner, an Australian sports scientist who was part of the Team GB coaching squad. He had been with her pre-2008. It was here their problems had started.<\/p>\n

To recap: those Olympic years were also the years in which she fought to protect \u2014 and defend \u2014 her relationship with Gardner, which was prohibited by British Cycling protocol. In her 2012 autobiography, Between the Lines, Pendleton revealed how members of the coaching team sought to shame them and split them up. Gardner was dismissed from his job (he was the easier of the two to let go) and, suddenly visa-less, was sent back to Australia. This caused a rupture between Pendleton and her Team GB mates, who blamed her for taking him from the rest of them. She had a history of self-harming and self-doubt. She cut herself with nail scissors in front of her coaches to try to convey the level of harm they were inflicting on her mental health.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The couple withstood four years, 2008 to 2012, of Olympic training and competition. After her retirement, they married in 2013. It was a kind of Romeo and Juliet story. Pendleton has always been straightforward, \u201calthough being honest about [my mental health] never really worked well for me in the press\u201d, she explains. \u201cI was often cornered into being painted as quite tragic, a sort of damsel in distress, and it could be quite demeaning.\u201d<\/p>\n

Marriage was, it seemed, a happy ending. \u201cI thought I was going to live a fairytale,\u201d Pendleton says. You get a sense she wanted a family, or at least that\u2019s what everybody assumed she wanted.<\/p>\n

She trained as a jockey and fulfilled a personal ambition in 2016 of riding in the Cheltenham Festival, a bizarre plot twist. But in 2018 she announced the couple were divorcing. She climbed Everest in an attempt to escape her pain, but almost died from hypoxia and had to abort the mission. The year of 2019 was lost to severe depression. She moved in with her mother, was numbed by medication and experienced suicidal ideation.<\/p>\n

\"LondonOnstage at BT London Live, in Hyde Park, London, with her 2012 Olympic medalsPA<\/p>\n

\u201cI was so disappointed in myself,\u201d she says of that time. \u201cI think it was the culmination of everything that had happened \u2014 the breakdown of my relationship, a bit of a midlife crisis. I thought I had everything planned out and suddenly it wasn\u2019t so planned. When you\u2019re severely depressed, it\u2019s hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I felt like I\u2019d failed horribly for the first time in my life. A failed marriage felt like one of the biggest failures.<\/p>\n

\u201c[The Olympics] was always going to put a strain on our relationship, because it was forged under extreme pressure and unpleasantness. So even when we were outside that system, there were still those scars pretty much running through our connection. I think that was a big part [of the marriage\u2019s failure].\u201d<\/p>\n

It is not an easy subject for her. She had stipulated before we met that she could not go into what exactly happened. With that divorce, after the relief of finally being able to relax into a \u201cnormal\u201d private life with Gardner, she lost her imagined future. I am surprised she even let me bring him up. But, as she says, she can\u2019t help being honest. It is an attractive trait.<\/p>\n

She says of the aftermath, \u201cI felt I\u2019d temporarily lost myself to this darkness.\u201d She got out of it by surfing with a friend in Costa Rica. When she took part in Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins, it was another turning point. \u201cI think the military would have been a really great career for me,\u201d she says almost wistfully. \u201cPart of me thinks I would have been young enough to have done it when I retired.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"NINTCHDBPICT001077051673\"With her boyfriend, Louis Tinsley, a former SBS soldier, whom she met after appearing on Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Winsvictorilou\/ Instagram<\/p>\n

Now there is a different life with Tinsley, out of the public eye. It\u2019s a life of tracksuits and welly boots, with her horse and their German shepherd\/malinois cross, Valor, and their ongoing renovation, walls of glass looking out into the forest and lots of Scandinavian black cladding.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s taken me time to move on from [bitterness] at my coaches. I know now it\u2019s not their fault. They just want the best. Athletes now are much better treated. Time has healed me a lot, perspective has healed me a lot, and just getting older and wiser. I\u2019ve become a lot more forgiving. You don\u2019t realise it at the time, but when you are angry about stuff and you can\u2019t change it, it just sits with you and the only person that was hurting was me. You can either hold on to it or you can come to terms with it and let it go.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tinsley and she are, Pendleton says, very independent of one another, but similar. She runs, trains (with him at weekends) and cooks outside due to the building work, using a head torch, either with a pizza oven or a rice cooker. Her mother, who had a triple heart bypass last summer and who cared for her during her 2019 depression, will come to live with them when it\u2019s finished. Pendleton lost her Olympic medals in the renovation. \u201cI packed them up and couldn\u2019t find them again.\u201d The medals are now back, but they\u2019re not exactly in a display cabinet.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cI look back now at my career,\u201d she says, \u201cand I think, well done for getting through and coming out the other side and actually being in a place now that I don\u2019t feel burdened by that kind of negativity or sadness or victim mentality. I\u2019m proud of myself because it could have been very different. I\u2019ve made good of quite a tricky situation.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m settled. I\u2019m happy, I\u2019ve made peace with it all.\u201d<\/p>\n

The reason we are meeting today is that Pendleton has written a second book, called The Fear Opportunity.<\/p>\n

It is a self-help title put together with an expert, way more science-based than her autobiography, and at its core are the hard lessons she has learnt: not letting the negative story you tell yourself hold you back \u2014 make yourself the hero instead; reframing events to your advantage; and not being afraid of failure. At its centre is a very simple message: life is too short not to celebrate it, to not live in the moment. It might feel simplistic, but it has been born of another real crisis in her life, way worse than divorce. It hit her three years ago.<\/p>\n

\"NINTCHDBPICT001077051679\"Pendleton with her brother, Alex, who died in 2023 at the age of 42victorilou\/ Instagram<\/p>\n

This year will mark the third anniversary of losing her beloved twin, Alex, to brain cancer. The loss of a twin has been proved to be psychologically devastating to the surviving sibling. They had\/have a much loved older sister, Nicola, but it was the twinship \u2014 she calls them \u201ctwinnies\u201d \u2014 that defined her: \u201cWe saw ourselves as blessed, not by God but by the stars, which fated us to be born into a team.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alex came downstairs slurring one day. His wife thought he had had a stroke. Within days it was identified as stage 4 brain cancer. Terminal. He was given 12 to 18 months to live.<\/p>\n

Her eyes fill with tears now. Her grief is still so close to the surface. \u201cIt is a strange feature of grief that the things you yearn for, moments that in bereavement would be your one genie\u2019s wish, are things that, when you had them, you barely noticed.\u201d You can feel how much she aches for him to be alive.<\/p>\n

The Pendleton children grew up in Bedfordshire. It was the twins who were encouraged and pushed by their father, Max Pendleton, an amateur cyclist (he died last year), to be potential national standard cyclists. He drove them on from the age of nine, pushing them on long bike rides up and down hills so that Victoria, a petite, skinny child, would chant to herself of her father, \u201cHe doesn\u2019t love me, he doesn\u2019t love me,\u201d to push her legs to catch up. Their first race was listed as Pendleton v Pendleton; there were no other children. At 15, Alex stepped away.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was highly strung. Alex was really relaxed. He was very much, \u2018This doesn\u2019t serve me, I won\u2019t do it.\u2019 His understanding of suffering and reward was much more balanced than mine. He\u2019d be like, \u2018Do you know what, I think I\u2019d be happier if I just did this instead.\u2019\u2009\u201d<\/p>\n

\"InvestiturePicking up her CBE at Buckingham Palace in 2013Paul Rogers for The Times<\/p>\n

Victoria had almost lost him when they were four years old, not that she knew it then. She just knew he was ill, not that he was potentially dying of leukaemia. She lived with their grandparents while doctors tried to save his life. Alex lost his hair during chemotherapy and then recovered. Victoria never knew how death had come for one of them, how close it had been, \u201cand I only really began to appreciate what my parents had done for me much later in shielding me from that\u201d. Their parents\u2019 marriage ultimately did not survive. Her father left their mother for another woman.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen he became ill again, Alex said to me, \u2018Do you know, I might be one of the people who just gets through it. There are people who have lived for ten years with this condition. I feel really good. I\u2019m eating fine.\u2019 He was so unbelievably optimistic, and I was happy to be on that journey with him. That was his way of dealing and coping with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

She writes devastatingly: \u201cI was tied up in contradicting emotions, until I was not, and we finally parted ways on June 22, 2023, 42 years after we became a team.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"VictoriaAfter finishing fifth in a race at the Cheltenham Festival, in 2016Splash News<\/p>\n

There was a maelstrom of guilt, she admits, about all the risks she had taken (especially at Cheltenham and trying to climb Everest), and yet why was it that Alex was the twin who had his life cut short?<\/p>\n

She came to see \u2014 eventually \u2014 that \u201cto feel grief at losing him without some sense of how incredible it was to have him would be disproportionate and cruel. I had to learn gratitude and I had to give myself over to awe.\u201d<\/p>\n

She practises what she preaches in the book. She is so bright and happy. Bereaved, yes, of course, but not broken \u2014 for his sake. \u201cI am so incredibly grateful for the life that is afforded me.\u201d<\/p>\n

She opens her shirt to show me a tattooed heart on her chest with Alex\u2019s name running through it, \u201cso that his heart is placed on my heart\u201d. On either side there are two peonies to mark the flowers that filled his hospital room.<\/p>\n

\"NINTCHDBPICT001079859374\"\u201cAs I get older, I start to see life more like a dance than hard work\u201dDan Kennedy for the times magazine<\/p>\n

Often, when she walks in the forest, she will place her hand on \u201chis\u201d inked-in heart and talk to him. \u201cI still think, oh, I can\u2019t wait to tell Alex \u2014 and then I remember. But if I\u2019m walking and the sun is out, I\u2019ll just say out loud, \u2018Oh Alex, I wish you could be here to enjoy this with me. I hope you\u2019re doing OK.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause I still want to feel close to him, like I can speak to him. I am just so lucky to have had him in my life for 42 years.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlex was like a perfect dance partner, and as I get older, I start to see life more like a dance than hard work.\u201d <\/p>\n

The Fear Opportunity: How Feeling Your Fear Builds Strength and Confidence by Victoria Pendleton (Bluebird, \u00a316.99) is published on May 21. To order go to timesbookshop.co.uk<\/a>. Discount for Times+ members<\/p>\n

Opening and third image: cream jacket, mango.com<\/a>. Vest, michaelkors.co.uk<\/a>. Shorts, topshop.com<\/a>. Second image: grey jacket and shorts, marella.com<\/a>. Shirt, withnothingunderneath.com<\/a>. Tights, calzedonia.com<\/a>. Tie, moss.co.uk<\/a>. Shoes, topshop.com<\/a>. Fourth image: black jacket, topshop.com<\/a>. Shirt,\u00a0thefrankieshop.com<\/a>. Hair: Alex Szabo at Carol Hayes Management. Make-up: Julia Wren using Shiseido<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The east London photographic studio is a silent, empty, echoey cavern when Victoria Pendleton, one of Britain\u2019s most…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":664291,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[49,48,84,393,394],"class_list":["post-664290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mental-health","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-health","tag-mental-health","tag-mentalhealth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=664290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664290\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/664291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=664290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=664290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=664290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}