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Between the Lines: My Autobiography. Victoria Pendleton
Читать онлайн.Название Between the Lines: My Autobiography
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780007459162
Автор произведения Victoria Pendleton
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство HarperCollins
Great Britain gained a second gold medal when Brad Wiggins swept to victory in the individual pursuit. The men won two more medals in the team pursuit and sprint events – and we finished fourth in the table. Russia were first, with four golds, but we had won one more than Australia and the Meares sisters who, for once, were not seen on the podium.
I smiled demurely when I handed my last warm specimen of urine to the waiting dope tester. If this was the kind of rigmarole foisted onto the world’s fourth-best sprinter, I could get used to it.
‘Danke schoen,’ I said in my very best Swiss-German accent.
My hard-won progress had been noted by Dave Brailsford and Shane Sutton. They knew Fred Magné was keen for me to stay on in Aigle for another year; and British cycling was prepared to fund an extended stay at a sprinting academy that might inspire me to a realistic tilt at an Olympic medal in Athens.
If it was difficult for me to think of myself as a potential podium cyclist, Peter Keen, who would soon become performance director at UK Sport, was emphatic about my prospects. I could hardly believe his words when, on the second last day of the year, my mum pressed an article into my hands. It was from the Guardian, on 30 December 2003, in an article headlined:
Young, gifted and on track to make headlines in the coming year: Coaches and experts from 12 sports name their top tips to make a breakthrough in 2004.
The chosen dozen included the cricketers Alastair Cook and Ravi Bopara, the gymnast Beth Tweedle and the footballer Andy Reid. Graham Saville, described as England’s youth guru and a member of the Essex County Cricket Club committee, considered the credentials of Cook who, then, was only eighteen: ‘Cooky scored a fifty in each of his first three matches for our first team. He’s a talented cricketer and I’m told he was a very good singer – a leading chorister at St Paul’s cathedral, apparently, until his voice broke.’
Lewis Hamilton was the penultimate name on the list of twelve. He was nominated by Martin Whitmarsh, the Managing Director of McLaren, who wrote of his ‘unusual talent’.
I was last on the list. Reading the words, I had tears in my eyes, hardly daring to believe that anyone could show such faith in my future:
Peter Keen, British Olympic coach: ‘Victoria Pendleton is the fastest emerging British cyclist in my book, with another sprinter, the Scot Ross Edgar, not far behind. She is 23 and will be pitching for a medal in the women’s sprint and 500m time trial. She was fourth and seventh in those events in the World Championships, but her rate of improvement is so fast and the gaps are so tight that if she goes 0.2 seconds faster it starts to look interesting. Vicky is bright, learns quickly and has natural speed and power that have only come through since she’s put in the strength training. Superficially she looks fragile, but she’s incredibly determined. She’s a complete sprinter now, and 2004 could be her year.’
It’s hard to tell how I got from there to here. I’m sitting on my bed, in my bare room, down an anonymous corridor at the hotel in Aigle, Switzerland, which doubles as the base for Frédéric Magné’s and the International Cycling Union’s racing academy. There is a Swiss Army knife on the white pillow. It has a bright red grip and two sharp blades of differing lengths. It also contains, at the flick of a wrist, a corkscrew, a can opener, a wire stripper, a key-ring, tweezers and a small pair of shiny scissors. The longest blade fills my gaze. I have been here before. I know what I need to do to make a new pain which will feel more clean and honest than the knotted mess inside me.
This year, 2004, has not been easy. It has been confusing and distressing. There have been a few uplifting moments. I won my first World Cup, in the individual sprint in Manchester in April. But there was also frustration. My Manchester victory was meant to be the perfect launch for a big breakthrough in the World Championships in Melbourne the following month. I qualified eighth fastest and then beat Yvonne Hijgenaar in the first round, Clara Sanchez, the French rider, next, before, in the quarter-finals, defeating Tsylinskaya, who had won the World title two years before. In the semi-final I faced the defending champion from Russia – Grankovskaya. It was a disaster. Adjudged to have crossed the line, and moved out of my designated racing area into Grankovskaya’s lane, I was relegated from the race and consigned to a scrap for the bronze medal.
As my mood dipped, so my desire wavered. I lost both third-place races to Lori-Ann Muenzer – who I knew so well from Fred’s academy. Lori-Ann had turned thirty-eight the week before and I felt dispirited that I had lost a World Championship medal to a rider who was fifteen years older than me. Even worse than that, when we shook hands on our bikes soon after crossing the finish line, Lori-Ann held mine and, with a smile, said: ‘You will always be a princess – but you will never be queen.’
From the stands people would have only seen her smiling at me as we completed our warm-down lap. In calling me ‘a princess’, she seemed to be implying that I was spoilt and pampered. I knew that she received no support from her academy in Canada while British Cycling paid for my entire stay in Aigle. But there was something else in her barbed comment. I felt Lori-Ann looked down on my kind of femininity. She had short and spiky blonde hair, with lots of piercings, and she was assertive and relatively intimidating. I had tried initially to befriend her but I found her closed and even cold towards me. Our relationship had not improved whenever I rode much more quickly than her up the mountains – as the climbing suited my smaller frame. Yet I was still shocked and even distressed by her taunting of me as a princess on the track.
After eighteen months of training under Fred I did not seem to be making the progress I should have done. In my depressed mood I considered fourth place at the Worlds a failure – as it repeated the same finish from the previous year in Stuttgart.
Grankovskaya defeated Anna Meares in a close final, by two races to one, but the younger Australian was a clear star in Melbourne. Her sister, Kerrie, was still out of competition with a back injury but Anna, just three days shy of being exactly three years younger than me, followed silver in the sprint with gold in the 500m time trial. I finished a lowly ninth. I was losing to riders both older and younger than me. It was hard to ignore the beaming joy of Martin Barras and the happy tears of the Meares sisters.
‘I’m ecstatic,’ Anna told the press corps after she had completed a lap of honour, draped in the Australian flag and acclaimed by tumultuous applause. ‘I probably didn’t expect a result like this. I thought it would be another year or two away. But Martin changed my training programme in the lead-up. We went back to the basic building blocks then trained me up for this. But I can’t tell you what we did. That’s a secret.’
I didn’t really care about the secret training routine of Anna Meares and Martin Barras. I just wanted to get the hell out of Melbourne and back to Aigle where, I hoped, Fred Magné would lift me out of my fourth-placed rut. I wanted to be like Chris Hoy, who had again won the kilo at the Worlds, or Theo Bos, the men’s new world sprint champion. I needed Fred to galvanize me.
Fred was cool and charismatic. He was also friendly towards me but, increasingly, I noticed how different he was around Ross. ‘Oh,’ Fred always laughed, ‘Ross is my favourite.’
I also loved Ross. He was great. But, secretly, I envied the relationship he had with Fred. They were able to kid around, and make each other laugh. Even more significantly, Fred went out of his way to boost Ross and to make him realize how much he had progressed. I wished Fred could believe in me as much as he believed in Ross. I knew I was being petty and so I never said a word to anyone. I just pedalled away, silently, hoping that one day I would be good enough to be called Fred’s favourite. I was so insecure and vulnerable, and in such desperate need of being liked, that those confusing thoughts tightened inside me.
Logically, disappointment at remaining in fourth place in successive World Championships was a healthy sign of my raised expectations. But the pride I had felt in Copenhagen and Stuttgart, at my first two World Championships, had soured in Melbourne. I felt stuck – and emotionally blocked.