Between the Lines: My Autobiography - Victoria Pendleton

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Wales and so Denise and I were in different parts of the village. I shared a room with an endurance rider I had barely met and always had the anxiety of looking for someone I could sit with in the food hall at every meal. Those little quirks unsettled me.

      I was also shocked by the electrifying atmosphere inside the velodrome. As an unseeded rider, I was allocated the very first ride on the very first night of competition – in the 500m time trial. I could hardly believe it when I looked up from the pits, ten minutes before my bike was wheeled onto the track, and saw that the velodrome was crammed with enthusiastic spectators. The enormity of attention made my spindly legs feel just a little wobbly.

      The arena went deadly silent when, supported upright on my lonely bike, I waited for the five-beep countdown. At the sound of the fifth and last beep, signalling the start of my timed race around two laps of the track, the velodrome erupted. The crowd had reacted before me and so, for a second, I remained static on my bike, stunned by the explosion of noise. I managed to start turning my legs just in time and, as I sped around the wooden boards, the roar of the crowd surged through me. The noise seemed to invade my very being. After I crossed the line, and looked down at my wrists as I circled the track in a warm-down lap, I could see that little goosebumps had formed on my skin.

      I finished fifth in the time trial, missing a medal, but I was confused once more in the sprint. The tactical vagaries were as mysterious as ever – especially as I had never ridden the event on the velodrome’s 250m of shimmering pine. Struggling again to keep count of the strategically slow laps, I won my first heat against Melanie Szubrycht, my England team-mate from Sheffield, but I was still immersed in the tactical head-fuck of trying not to be outwitted by my opponent. In the semi-final, Kerrie Meares, of Australia, introduced me to the rougher end of professional cycling. I didn’t expect to beat her, but I thought I’d give Kerrie a little run for the line. But she went out of her way to intimidate me.

      Even though she knew she had much more power and speed, she took me right up the bank and used her bike to flick me against the barrier. The crowd booed Meares vociferously. Even the briefest of glances made it plain that, comparing Meares’s physique to mine, she had the clear beating of me if we raced in a straight line. It seemed bizarre that she should feel the need to intimidate me.

      It was illuminating to watch the final between Meares and Canada’s Lori-Ann Muenzer. ‘Suddenly the Friendly Games were wearing a scowl,’ Eddie Butler wrote in the Observer as he moonlighted from commentating and writing about rugby to cover an obscure sport like cycling. ‘Meares won the first of three sprints, but was disqualified for what the judges called “intending to cause her opponent to slow down”. In other words, it seemed to this novice spectator, she tried to drive poor Lori-Ann up and over the cliff of the north curve. And what’s more, she seemed to do exactly the same thing in the second leg. The crowd was just building up to a growl of disapproval when a judge fired a gun twice. Presumably this was to halt the race, but in terms of keeping the atmosphere wholesome it was most effective, if slightly draconian. Meares was not disqualified this time, which seemed a bit iffy to me, but it did not cause a flutter among more knowledgeable onlookers. They restarted leg two, which Meares won in legit style. As she did the decider. All very thrilling; she won by half a spoke on the line.’

      I could see how the brutal riding and bullish physique of the Meares sisters, Kerrie and Anna, chimed with the perspective of their new coach. Australia, the Meares girls and Martin Barras were dominant. But the British squad, split into four countries at the Commonwealth Games, was growing stronger by the month. I already knew that, for Chris Hoy and Bradley Wiggins, a glittering future loomed. My own life, both on and off the bike, was less certain.

      It took just weeks for the next twist. I was invited to race for Great Britain in my first World Cup event in Kunming, China. Even the name, Kunming, sounded deeply mysterious in early August 2002. Mum drove me to the airport and we met Shane Sutton for the first time. I found him a little frightening, and Mum admitted later that she felt mildly concerned leaving me in the company of such an intense Australian.

      Shane had won a gold medal alongside his brother Gary in the team pursuit at the 1978 Commonwealth Games, and he’d eventually moved to Britain in 1984 to continue racing. Three years later, he had ridden the Tour de France. Since his retirement he had become the national track cycling coach in Wales and, in 2002, Shane had joined the GB programme. We were both new to the squad but there was little doubt that the grizzled Aussie was coping better than me.

      Shane must have recognized my uncertainty, for he did much to try and help me settle. Beneath the gruff exterior there was, clearly, a paternal streak in him towards me. I was overwhelmed. Soon after we touched down, and feeling dazzled after so many hours in the air, I was shocked by a different culture. Walking to the airport toilet I sidestepped a few phlegm-ridden tracers of spit as old women simply cleared their throats and shot the snotty contents onto the concourse floor. I was even more taken aback by the sight of women leaving their toilet doors wide open as they did their personal business over an open hole. Feeling very prim and proper, I closed the door to my own cubicle. I was not quite ready to embrace all the customs of Chinese culture.

      Our hotel, however, was beautiful, with huge ornamental gardens where hedges were shaped into Chinese dragons. I was even more fascinated by the contrast that was evident from the back window of my lavish room. In the slum behind the hotel, lines of corrugated iron and tarpaulin could not hide the seething life as people washed their hair, squabbled and shouted while children went to the loo in full view on the side of the jumbled streets.

      Kunming was the capital of Yunnan province and the track was a two-hour drive away from the city. In a crammed minibus, Bradley Wiggins, Tony Gibb, Kieran Page, Shane and I sat alongside riders from other countries. I usually perched next to a slightly older and kind Czech sprint cyclist, Pavel Buran. My eyes must have looked huge as I gazed at everything around us. We had already been offered suckling pig at a welcome banquet at our hotel, which I firmly declined, but I was still shocked to see two half-pigs stuck on a spike on the back of a motorbike. A couple of kids were perched upfront on the bike, with their dad behind them, and I thought they would have been amazed to hear that, when I was a girl, I loved pigs so much that my pencil case at school was covered in pictures of them. I was not quite ready to see so many butchered animals covered by flies as they flashed past our bus.

      Once we had escaped the clogged heart of Kunming we hit some bumpy road which took us deep into rural China. Women and elderly men could be seen on the land, doing the work of farm machinery with their hands, as we raced through the dust and the heat towards my first World Cup event.

      The brand new outdoor track, found at the base of the Himalayas, was hidden behind a big cast-iron gate which swung open slowly to reveal a mysterious sight. It was the first time I had seen a 330m track. We mostly raced at night, so it looked even more surreal under floodlights as giant moths flew around our heads. They were around two inches in length, and half-an-inch wide, and they looked scary – especially when their furry wingspan spread to three inches. I did my best to duck under them and also to avoid riding over the splattered remnants of squashed moth on the track.

      Li Na, from China, won the women’s sprint. I finished fifth – amazed to have completed my first World Cup. I also felt like a freak-show star for, along with a blonde German cyclist, Christine Müller, I was stopped continually by Chinese people who wanted to take a photograph. Christine and I looked as unusual to the rural Chinese as the teeming slums and spiked pigs had seemed to me.

      Shane Sutton still watched over me and, on the long trip home, we stopped off in transit in Bangkok. It was a nine-hour wait and Shane arranged for all of us to take a tour of the city. In a night market in downtown Bangkok, eating ravenously while watching some sumptuous Thai dancing, I melted into another experience. If these were the kind of strange, new places where cycling could take me I was ready for so much more. I was ready to see the world.

      I lost myself, for a long while, in a place of breath-stealing beauty.

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