On this blog we like to champion successful women and in the British cycling world Victoria Pendleton is one of the most successful. Over her career she won numerous championships across the globe including two gold medals at the Olympic games. What makes her career even more inspiring is that after she retired from cycling she didn’t rest on her laurels and instead threw herself into another discipline, horse racing.
In an interview with The Guardian after her 2012 success, Pendleton told the paper that her earliest memory of riding a bike was with her father and brother at the age of four. She started her career at the age of six and would compete against her brother for many years. By her mid-teens she was beating her brother and was noticed by the British national team who asked her to join.
Very quickly she found herself training alongside Chris Hoy and Bradley Wiggins who would both, like Pendleton, become future household names. Pendleton speaks with clarity over her early disappointments, which culminated in a ninth place finish at the 2004 Olympic Games.
However, she wasn’t about to quit and turned that disappointment into a winning streak with her first World Track Championships win in 2005. This was followed with a gold medal at the 2006 Commonwealth Games.
At the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing she won her first gold in the sprint. Yet despite her success Pendleton found her place in the British team unwelcome after it was revealed she was in a relationship with Steven Gardner one of the team’s performance analysts. Despite facing a rough time over her relationship status, Pendleton continued to perform at the highest level confirming her place as one of the best cyclists in the world.
The 2012 Olympic Games in London is considered one of Britain’s greatest sporting achievements and Pendleton once again shined winning gold and silver. It was an astonishingly end to an astonishingly career. Yet it wasn’t the end of Pendleton.
Never one to turn down a challenge she readily accepted the momentous task to become a professional jockey and compete in the Foxhunter Chase at Cheltenham Festival within a year. In an interview with The Telegraph she recounted how she knew she could take on the task. “I had to read the proposal through a few times. I knew if it was based on sheer determination alone I would be able to give it a good go but I could not help thinking about those thundering hoofs.”
Horse racing is one of Britain’s oldest sports and its popularity stretches much further than the track. The Grand National is regularly watched by over 600 million viewers worldwide, and the sport is often used by gaming companies, including the UK-based BGT Games who have a Champion Raceway game dedicated to it, to entice fans and help bring in new audiences to the sport. So intrigued by the proposal, Pendleton once again threw herself into a sport and once again she felt a pushback.
Many racing commentators thought it was unwise and unsafe for her to compete, and it is fair to say many wanted her to fail. Instead she surprised the racing world by not only taking part in the race but also finishing fifth.
In our view Pendleton is truly inspirational both as a female cyclist and as a sports star. She shows that with determination any odds can be overcome.
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