The east London photographic studio is a silent, empty, echoey cavern when Victoria Pendleton, one of Britain’s most famous Olympic cyclists, walks in alone and early. Dame Laura Kenny has since overtaken her haul of Olympic cycling medals, but Pendleton — who won a gold at Beijing 2008, a gold and a silver at London 2012, and was appointed MBE and CBE — 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.
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). 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 — the edgy indie kind. She is covered in tattoos.
“I was often cornered into being painted as quite tragic, a damsel in distress, and it could be quite demeaning”dan kennedy for the times magazinE
“This place,” she says, looking around the studio. “I’ve been here before. It’s a bit triggering. I think I was here being photographed naked on a bike.” 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 “Victoria Pendleton: one cyclist with nothing to hide”. There were other covers — lads’ mags, upmarket men’s mags — but unlike in that image, her back muscles were often airbrushed out. “I was happy when I was in control,” she says. “I didn’t mind swimwear or sporty underwear, but if they brought out frilly see-through lingerie, I’d say no.”
She retells all this in the manner of “another woman, another lifetime”.
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 — and would make her gag — 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 — 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 — parties, booze, dating.
The tattoo on her chest is a tribute to her late twin brother, Alexdan kennedy for the times magazinE
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 — by no means just physical — her Olympic career has given her financial stability and long-term happiness with Tinsley. She met him in 2019 through an SAS instructor’s 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.
To recap: those Olympic years were also the years in which she fought to protect — and defend — 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.
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, “although being honest about [my mental health] never really worked well for me in the press”, she explains. “I was often cornered into being painted as quite tragic, a sort of damsel in distress, and it could be quite demeaning.”
Marriage was, it seemed, a happy ending. “I thought I was going to live a fairytale,” Pendleton says. You get a sense she wanted a family, or at least that’s what everybody assumed she wanted.
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.
Onstage at BT London Live, in Hyde Park, London, with her 2012 Olympic medalsPA
“I was so disappointed in myself,” she says of that time. “I think it was the culmination of everything that had happened — the breakdown of my relationship, a bit of a midlife crisis. I thought I had everything planned out and suddenly it wasn’t so planned. When you’re severely depressed, it’s hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I felt like I’d failed horribly for the first time in my life. A failed marriage felt like one of the biggest failures.
“[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’s failure].”
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 “normal” 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’t help being honest. It is an attractive trait.
She says of the aftermath, “I felt I’d temporarily lost myself to this darkness.” 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. “I think the military would have been a really great career for me,” she says almost wistfully. “Part of me thinks I would have been young enough to have done it when I retired.”
With her boyfriend, Louis Tinsley, a former SBS soldier, whom she met after appearing on Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Winsvictorilou/ Instagram
Now there is a different life with Tinsley, out of the public eye. It’s 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.
“It’s taken me time to move on from [bitterness] at my coaches. I know now it’s 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’ve become a lot more forgiving. You don’t realise it at the time, but when you are angry about stuff and you can’t 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.”
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’s finished. Pendleton lost her Olympic medals in the renovation. “I packed them up and couldn’t find them again.” The medals are now back, but they’re not exactly in a display cabinet.
“I look back now at my career,” she says, “and I think, well done for getting through and coming out the other side and actually being in a place now that I don’t feel burdened by that kind of negativity or sadness or victim mentality. I’m proud of myself because it could have been very different. I’ve made good of quite a tricky situation.
“I’m settled. I’m happy, I’ve made peace with it all.”
The reason we are meeting today is that Pendleton has written a second book, called The Fear Opportunity.
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 — 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.
Pendleton with her brother, Alex, who died in 2023 at the age of 42victorilou/ Instagram
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 — she calls them “twinnies” — that defined her: “We saw ourselves as blessed, not by God but by the stars, which fated us to be born into a team.”
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.
Her eyes fill with tears now. Her grief is still so close to the surface. “It is a strange feature of grief that the things you yearn for, moments that in bereavement would be your one genie’s wish, are things that, when you had them, you barely noticed.” You can feel how much she aches for him to be alive.
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, “He doesn’t love me, he doesn’t love me,” 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.
“I was highly strung. Alex was really relaxed. He was very much, ‘This doesn’t serve me, I won’t do it.’ His understanding of suffering and reward was much more balanced than mine. He’d be like, ‘Do you know what, I think I’d be happier if I just did this instead.’ ”
Picking up her CBE at Buckingham Palace in 2013Paul Rogers for The Times
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, “and I only really began to appreciate what my parents had done for me much later in shielding me from that”. Their parents’ marriage ultimately did not survive. Her father left their mother for another woman.
“When he became ill again, Alex said to me, ‘Do 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’m eating fine.’ 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.”
She writes devastatingly: “I 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.”
After finishing fifth in a race at the Cheltenham Festival, in 2016Splash News
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?
She came to see — eventually — that “to 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.”
She practises what she preaches in the book. She is so bright and happy. Bereaved, yes, of course, but not broken — for his sake. “I am so incredibly grateful for the life that is afforded me.”
She opens her shirt to show me a tattooed heart on her chest with Alex’s name running through it, “so that his heart is placed on my heart”. On either side there are two peonies to mark the flowers that filled his hospital room.
“As I get older, I start to see life more like a dance than hard work”Dan Kennedy for the times magazine
Often, when she walks in the forest, she will place her hand on “his” inked-in heart and talk to him. “I still think, oh, I can’t wait to tell Alex — and then I remember. But if I’m walking and the sun is out, I’ll just say out loud, ‘Oh Alex, I wish you could be here to enjoy this with me. I hope you’re doing OK.’
“Because 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.
“Alex was like a perfect dance partner, and as I get older, I start to see life more like a dance than hard work.”
The Fear Opportunity: How Feeling Your Fear Builds Strength and Confidence by Victoria Pendleton (Bluebird, £16.99) is published on May 21. To order go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Discount for Times+ members
Opening and third image: cream jacket, mango.com. Vest, michaelkors.co.uk. Shorts, topshop.com. Second image: grey jacket and shorts, marella.com. Shirt, withnothingunderneath.com. Tights, calzedonia.com. Tie, moss.co.uk. Shoes, topshop.com. Fourth image: black jacket, topshop.com. Shirt, thefrankieshop.com. Hair: Alex Szabo at Carol Hayes Management. Make-up: Julia Wren using Shiseido