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BREAKING THE CYCLE
Victoria Pendleton on hitting rock bottom after divorce and regaining control of her life
IT'S taken eight turbulent years, a crushing divorce and a near-suicide attempt, but retired double Olympic gold-winning cyclist Victoria Pendleton has finally conquered her demons.
Posing with hair tinged lilac and striking tattoos adorning her athletic arms, she looks a world away from the clean-cut golden girl of cycling, yet is more comfortable in her own skin than ever before.
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“The thing with the tattoos is, I really feel like I’m in a position in my life where being judged doesn’t concern me,” says Victoria.
“I’m not afraid of being myself any more. Whereas before, being an athlete, I always felt I had to stick to the guidelines and try to be a good role model – all these things kept me in a very confined space.
“But I’ve always been the kind of girl that wanted to ride a motorcycle and liked heavy metal. I’m a big contradiction. I’m someone who sticks to the rules, but I like to do things that are a little bit out there. Everyone finds me very confusing.”
Our cover shoot in east London, a few days before lockdown began, was the last outing for Victoria, 39, who is speaking to us from self-isolation inside her Oxfordshire countryside home where she lives alone, following her divorce from ex-husband Scott Gardner in early 2019.
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- Top, New Look -
- Trousers, £36, Topshop -
She comments on how strange it was to do a shoot with so much distancing, plenty of disinfectant spray and wipes, and surgical gloves for applying make-up. Yet Victoria couldn’t have felt more at ease in front of the camera, her confidence signalling she truly has turned a corner.
This August marks eight years since the nine-time world champion, who won gold in Beijing in 2008 and at London 2012, packed in turning left for a living, announcing she was “too old to carry on” competitive cycling at the age of 30.
Growing up in Bedfordshire with twin brother Alex, older sister Nicola, her amateur cyclist father Max and mother Pauline, she’d shown a fierce competitive spirit from an early age, but also felt a deep sense of inadequacy.
That vulnerability, in part suppressed by hurtling around velodromes at 75kph and hoovering up world titles, resurfaced with a vengeance post-retirement in August 2012, a decision she says was also fuelled by a corrosive cycling culture and a lack of support from Team GB bosses, who had turned their investment towards the younger generation.
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- Shoes, Topshop -
But after stepping down, Victoria struggled to forge a new life outside the elite sport she had dedicated herself to since the age of nine. “It’s sad when it’s all you’ve ever known – to let it go and move on,” she admits.
“When you’re successful at that level and have that confidence and support around you, then suddenly you don’t have anything, it’s almost like you lose your ability to express yourself.
It’s like: ‘What else am I good at? I know I’ve got drive, I know I’ve got discipline, but in terms of actual skills? I can pedal really fast. Ultimately, what can I offer the world now? What is my self-worth?’ That took a while to settle in. It was terrifying.”
In 2018, six years into her retirement and still struggling to connect with normal life, Victoria hit her lowest ebb. Despite being open-minded about all of the opportunities that had come her way – she took part in Strictly Come Dancing alongside Brendan Cole in 2012 and became a bona fide amateur jockey – nothing filled the void of “feeling like a superhero” on the cycling track in physical peak condition.
- Dress, £59.99, Mango -
Meanwhile, her five-year marriage to Scott, whom she met while training for the 2008 Beijing Olympics when he was a sports scientist at British Cycling, broke down, with the pair saying that they had “grown apart”.
He moved out of their Oxfordshire home and Victoria found herself single for the first time in 10 years.
The announcement of the split came in July 2018, shortly after she revealed that she had suffered from depression following a televised charity climb of Mount Everest with Ben Fogle that April. She was struck ill with hypoxia, a condition in which the brain is starved of oxygen, and forced to quit before she hit the summit.
Back home, the anxiety this caused, coupled with the end of her marriage, triggered a deep depression. “It was an accumulation of so many factors that had got on top of me,” she says.
“Everything in my personal life was out of control – there was this huge sense of loss from losing my sporting career, my marriage had broken down, the hypoxia…
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"Each of those things individually might have been manageable, but together, I didn’t have enough to give. I wasn’t coping and I spiralled down and down and down into a place I didn’t think I could get out of, for about five months.
"I felt very frustrated because I was like: ‘I’m an Olympic champion – I should be able to get out of this myself.’”
Victoria began to feel suicidal and would fantasise about the ways she could take her life.
Were it not for an early morning phone call to her friend, British Cycling’s team psychiatrist Dr Steve Peters, the athlete admits she would probably be dead.
“I was minutes away from it,” she recalls. “There was one morning where I hadn’t slept all night and I didn’t want to see another day, but I made one last-chance phone call to Steve.
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It must have been about 6am, and he picked up and managed to talk me round, and I’m so happy and I’m so grateful that he did pick up the phone that → day, because I wasn’t going to see another morning,” she says.
“He rang my family and my brother came over. I was told I wasn’t allowed to stay by myself any more. My options were to either go to a psychiatric hospital for my own safety or move in with my mother and she would keep an eye on me, so I chose my mum.”
Victoria has always been open about her mental health battles – she revealed in her 2012 autobiography Between The Lines how she cut herself with nail scissors on the night she won her first Olympic gold medal at Beijing 2008, following a row with coach Jan van Eijden over her relationship with Scott, which was frowned upon.
Following her near suicide attempt, she was diagnosed with severe depression for the first time and put on tranquillisers and sleeping tablets, on top of antidepressants.
But Victoria hated being dependent on medication and instead took herself surfing in Costa Rica that August. The daily adrenalin rush of catching a wave enabled her to forget everything else that was going on in her mind and she began to feel better.
I like to do things that are a little bit out there. Everyone finds me very confusing
Victoria Pendleton
“Everyone tells you to be patient and you just want to punch them, and every day feels like a week,” she says. “But the truth is, for someone who’s been on the other side of it and come through, it will pass.
One of the biggest pieces of advice I’d give to anyone struggling is to identify the things that give you joy in life. Surfing, cooking, being in the garden and having my hands in the soil, spending time with my horses and riding my motorcycle all bring me joy.
Regular exercise is also important to me, spending time with the people I love and removing negative personalities from my life.
“I’m more aware of my own mental wellbeing, which is something I really did not invest in before. Now, when I start to feel down, I pick it up a lot quicker and do something about it.
"For the first time in my life, I’ve tried to embrace just being me and being OK with that. It’s given me that ‘I’ll do whatever’ attitude, because I realise how precious my time is. It’s helped me be more ‘me’.”
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Victoria was reminded of how differently things could have turned out when she heard the news about the tragic death of TV presenter Caroline Flack, who took her own life aged 40 – just one year older than herself.
Choking back emotion, Victoria says she can relate to how lost and lonely the Love Island host must have felt during those final dark days at her flat in north London.
“It hit home,” she says. “I felt very sad that day. I have an appreciation for how lonely she must have felt and the fact she was suffering even more than I had…
"That makes me feel really, really sad. It’s not something you’d wish on your worst enemy that feeling. It hit home, and I think a lot of people felt very affected by it, understandably.
"Because she was a personality that was so full of life and energy, and beautiful and talented, and you think: ‘How? How is that even possible?’
THE LAST...
- Book you read? A Very Human Ending: How Suicide Haunts Our Species by Jesse Bering.
- Album you listened to? Stormzy’s Heavy Is The Head.
- Box set you binged? It was a film trilogy – John Wick, back-to-back. I want to be John Wick now.
- WhatsApp you received? A group chat from my stables, trying to keep us all motivated in self-isolation.
- Time you were drunk? I had a glass of rosé yesterday and felt a bit tipsy.
- Time you cried? Watching the first John Wick film. Someone kills his dog – it’s terrible! A puppy!
“But at the time, I thought no one would really care. No one would mind because you justify to yourself that it would be the kindest thing to do to disappear, you’d be doing everyone else a favour.
"It’s weird, it’s very strange. Only now I realise how many people I would have upset.”
For Victoria, it was no easy feat rebooting her entire life and career at 30, a birthday she marked by getting the first of her nine tattoos – the Smashing Pumpkins lyric: “Today is the greatest day I’ve ever known” – on the inside of her wrist.
After her marriage split, her confidence plummeted so low she had £1,500 of Botox and fillers to try to boost it.
But now, as she approaches her 40th birthday in September, Victoria – who is tight-lipped about her love life, but admits she is dating – says with undeniable conviction that she has truly learned to love “who I am for what I am” for the first time in her life.
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She understands that the only validation she needs is from herself – not an Olympic coach, nor the nation and definitely not from a man.
“I realised after the divorce that I had never really been on my own,” she says. “I’ve always felt like I needed to have someone else in my life to validate myself in some way.
It’s been really good for me to be on my own and realise that, actually, I’m very capable, I can be happy by myself, I don’t need someone else to justify me or my existence.
I really wish I had learned that earlier in my life, but I was quite vulnerable as an athlete. I was always under high pressure and having someone around me, to give me that support, it felt like I had to have it, like it was the crutch I needed.”
Two years ago, would have cringed at the thought of turning 40. Now, she is preparing to throw a huge party to mark the milestone. It will be her first birthday party since she was seven.
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“I’ve never really had a party because I’ve always been training,” she says. “It became a habit to get the birthday blues: ‘I’m training so I probably shouldn’t do anything’, so I’ve always been really bad at organising anything.
"But this time, I want a massive knees-up with the family – and loads of margaritas! It’s going to be a lot easier turning 40 than it was turning 20. Back then, I had a lot of self-doubt and lacked a lot of confidence. I remember thinking I looked weird, skinny and boyish – the bus driver mistook me for a boy a few times.
"I mean, I did use to wear boys clothes, but just generally I was not very comfortable in my own skin. I think that’s an age and experience thing. It’s taken me a long time to be happy with being me.”
- Victoria is working with The Wave Project ().
CREDITS
Hair: Dino Pereira using Kiehl’s Since 1851 Magic Elixir
Make-up: Aimee Adams using Nars
Styling: Nana Acheampong
Athletes Adam Gemili, Victoria Pendleton, Danny Care and Oisin Murphy take on one of the fastest horses in the world
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