Victoria Pendleton Cried Before Every Race

Fear never once cost her a race

In this exclusive interview with theALLBRIGHT.com, the double Olympic gold medallist reflects on a coach who told her to hide her fear, be more like the men, on the emotions she refused to bury, the failures she’s stopped fearing, and what keeps her up at night now.

“You need to be more like the men” Victoria Pendleton’s coach used to tell her. “Don’t show your fear. It makes you look weak and gives your opponent an advantage.”

Fifteen years after retirement from elite cycling, the double Olympic gold medalist and nine-times world champion is still dismayed that this happened; even on Zoom, I see it in her body language. Pendleton, 45, is immensely warm, smiley and relaxed, which belies my expectations of the fierce force of nature she is on the track. When I tell her, half-jokingly, that I’m slightly scared but trying to see my “fear as an opportunity” as I interview her about her new book, The Fear Opportunity, she gasps. “Oh, don’t be!” she laughs. “Don’t do that!”

When it comes to injustice or inequality however, especially of the sexist kind, the relaxed warmth is replaced by that same fierceness. Her blue eyes widen with indignation. “Oh yeah, I got the ‘be more like men’ comment all the time, in my early career” she says when I express my disbelief at this. “I used to think, but I’m not a man. When I’d get tearful before a race, they’d say ‘look at her, she’s mental, she’s going to fall apart.’ But expressing myself was how I dealt with the nerves. It didn’t mean I wasn’t going to win on race day! I thought I had to hide my fear otherwise I’d not be trusted, but hand on heart, I’ve never turned up to a race and fallen apart. I’ve never not delivered my best performance.”

“I'm so determined not to fit into those expectations of what a woman can, or should do.”

It was these performances that earned Pendleton a gold medal in the Beijing 2008 Olympics and a gold and silver in London, 2012. She believes it is because she wears her heart on her sleeve, (and on her body; Pendleton has many tattoos including a The Smashing Pumpkins lyric, “Today is the greatest day I've ever known," which says everything about her attitude to life), that allowed her access to this level of performance.

It never occurred to Pendleton until she was talent spotted at the age of sixteen for the GB cycling squad that sport, fear, or anything else, would be a gendered issue. Growing up in Bedfordshire, with her twin brother Alex, her parents went to great lengths to treat them equally. “It was simply a case of anything he could do I could do.”

And one of her and Alex’s favourite things to do from a young age, was bomb down homemade slaloms on their bikes. “That was my first experience of risk,” says Pendleton. “I don’t remember being scared though, because I had a constant teammate in Alex. I just remember being exhilarated by the challenge of it.”

It must have come as a bit of a shock I say, when she got into professional cycling and equality did not always prevail.

She laughs ruefully. “It’s still a surprise, every bloody day! It’s a continual battle because I’m so determined not to fit into those expectations of what a woman can, or should do.”

“Most of my fear of failure was tied up with my perception of people's expectations of me. When I recognised that, I was able to reframe it. I would never judge someone's performance, but I did that to myself. ”

Pendleton’s new book, The Fear Opportunity, makes the case for reframing fear not as something to avoid but something to use as fuel to live more expansive, confident, ultimately joyful lives. She talks about ‘proactive’ fear: this idea of actively ‘seeking out’ things that scare us, whether that be sprinting around a racetrack, or asking someone on a date.

I ask her, given her own experience as a professional athlete but also a woman, if she feels that when it comes to fear - the management, the expression of it and what happens when we dare to feel it - that there is one rule for men and one for women?

She nods enthusiastically. “Fundamentally, we all have the skills to face fear and assess risk but there’s this perception that adventure, challenge is not a woman’s arena and it drives me crazy. There’s still so much cynicism around women adventurers. I think it’s hard for women to move into areas that they’ve historically not been accepted but I think it’s so important that we do that, courageously.”

I tell Victoria – or ‘Vic’ as she likes to be called - how I wonder if it’s not just prejudice around whether women can do scary things we’re talking about, but what happens when they do. We discuss the example of female war reporters. Are they seen as reckless whereas male war reporters are ‘heroes’?

“I think it’s about the level of responsibility that women have to everyone else. “Or society’s perception of this. (That word ‘perception’ again, more of this later.) There’s also a lack of opportunity. Let's face it, if you’re expected to be the sole, free provider, the caregiver as many women are, how do you make time for experimenting with things that scare you? Challenging adventures? There's a whole bunch of barriers that have nothing to do with a woman's ability to manage or overcome fear, but about the constraints of her expected existence.”

“There's a whole bunch of barriers that have nothing to do with a woman's ability to manage or overcome fear, but about the constraints of her expected existence. ”

Pendleton is not one to be constrained by her ‘expected existence’ that’s for sure. It feels like she’s built a life doing the opposite. After retiring from cycling following the 2012 Olympics, she needed a new challenge – a fear opportunity. Betting company Betfair set her one: the “Switching Saddles” project. Could an elite cyclist with virtually no horse-riding experience train to become an amateur jockey and compete at the Cheltenham Festival? The answer was yes. She came fifth.

“Everyone said I shouldn’t do it, that it was too dangerous, but I’m so glad I didn’t listen to the cynics. It was the most terrifying yet exhilarating thing I’ve ever done” she says, with considerable glee. “Because of, not despite of the fact I was a novice.”

This brings us onto a conversation about her relationship with failure, which she says is more “complicated and interesting” than the more public one she has with success. I am curious, I tell her, about how she found the transition from being a world-champion to an amateur jockey? Did she ever see that as a failure of sorts? She bristles slightly, but then she relays a similar question a male journalist asked her at a pre-Cheltenham conference, and I can see why.

“‘So, Victoria' he said” she tells me. ‘You've gone from being the very best in the world at what you do, to an absolute novice' And he did tone it like that. ‘How does that make you feel?' I thought it was a ridiculous question, because of course I was a novice. I don't expect that because I'm good at one thing, I'm going to be immediately excellent at something else. There was this presumption that my ego may be dented, but this is a completely different sport with a live animal. I didn’t see it as a failure but an opportunity.”

Was there a time where she did feel she’d failed? “The 2004 Athens Olympics. “I went out in the first round and was absolutely devastated. But my perception of people's expectations of me at that point was off the scale. When I recognized that most of my fear of failure was tied up with that, or my perception of that, because let’s face it, I didn't actually know what they thought, I was able to reframe it. I would never judge someone’s performance, but I did that to myself.”

“Everyone said I shouldn't do it, that it was too dangerous, but I'm so glad I didn't listen to the cynics. It was the most terrifying yet exhilarating thing I've ever done.”

Pendleton suffers from terrible FOMO. “Which is why I say yes to everything’ she laughs. Even if in hindsight, that feels like a mistake.

In May 2018, Pendleton attempted to climb Mount Everest for charity but had to abandon the climb due to severe altitude sickness. A dark time followed.

“It took me ages to process and understand what I was feeling and why” she says. “I was so disappointed in myself. My body had always delivered before, and I couldn’t accept I’d now lost faith in it. I didn't realize how tightly I was holding onto it as a source of my self-worth.”

“Physically, I was trying to achieve the impossible on Everest. At the same time, my relationship at home was breaking down (Pendleton announced her split from husband Scott Gardner two months later). I was just going from challenge to challenge in life without being true to myself. In hindsight, I’m like, ‘wow, what was I thinking?! It was pure avoidance – fear of feeling my emotions.”

Accepting the limitations of her body now that she’s in midlife, is a work in progress.

“Even when I go to the gym now, it’s very different from when I was 25” she says. “The work I put in is different to the outcome! I am kinder to myself now though. I've always been super-disciplined, and it was hard to break free from that. But my body is not a tool of the trade now, it’s something to take care of. I listen to my body in terms of my menstrual cycle, which is not something that was discussed when I was an athlete 15 years ago.”

So, what frightens Victoria Pendleton now?

“Not a lot. I even pick up quite big spiders in my bare hands!” she laughs. “But seriously, the only thing that really scares me is losing the people I love, again and again.”

Tragically, in 2023, her twin brother Alex died from a brain tumour. Then, in 2025, her father Max, a passionate amateur cyclist and the one to introduce her, also died.

“I was there until the very last moment with both of them and I will be brave if I have to do that again, but I'd rather not if that's okay” she says, with a sad smile. “What scares me the most therefore, is not making the most of the time I have with the people I love, that I start behaving in a way that does not honor that.”

Does she still get scared about others’ judgement? “Couldn’t care less. I just want to be a positive inspiring voice, the one in your corner shouting, ‘go forth and do something awesome; the devil on your shoulder, going, ‘you can do it!’”

And as a woman, I want to do that for other women because the cynicism is rife out there. A lovely part of getting older, is being more supportive of my sisterhood.”