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the team bus when he played football.

      ‘If you’re good enough, Mabel,’ he would say, ‘they’ll always wait for you …’

      Alf Viney was an amusing and kind man; and he survived the death of Mabel by keeping active. Every lunchtime Granddad made the short walk down the back alley behind his house to the Irish Social where, without fail, he would drink his pint-and-a-half of beer while remembering the days he’d also played cricket and football and table-tennis for the county. Granddad told me that a pint-and-a-half a day kept him strong. It helped him play golf until the age of ninety-two and he was always trying to get me to taste his beer. ‘It’s good for you, Victoria,’ he’d say when I scrunched up my face at the taste, before reminding me again that everyone should call me ‘Champ’. Granddad always made me laugh.

      My relationship with Nicola and Alex also improved once we were living apart from each other. In our teenage years the typical strains between siblings had been evident. But now, leading new lives away from home, our old closeness re-emerged. Everything had begun to gel – family, university and, increasingly, cycling.

      At the start of a new century, during the spring of 2001, I discovered a different world in a battered and stationary old camper van. For seven weeks, in the parking lot outside the Manchester Velodrome, I fell into exhausted sleep every night. It was a bizarre way to gain my first sustained taste of professional cycling but, having turned twenty the previous September, I loved my camper van experience.

      Phil Hayes, my personal tutor, and Marshall Thomas helped shape that profound change. Marshall had also studied at Northumbria and he was receptive when Phil, who worked with elite athletes at the university, approached him to see if he might help me find a work placement. Deep into the second year of my degree, Marshall arranged a seven-week-long work secondment for me in the World Class Performance Plan offices of British Cycling. Apart from giving me the chance to work in a sports office, my weeks on site allowed me to train regularly. Every lunchtime, and after work each evening, I could take my bike out on the gleaming boards that had so entranced me on my first afternoon at the velodrome. It was a unique opportunity for me to improve with consistent training.

      My record was still modest. I was best known for having won three national grass-track titles over 800m. In 1999, on the track, I had finished third in the national sprint championships over 500m. Those results look better now than they felt then. There was only one other British woman sprint cyclist of note – Wendy Everson. She had finished fourth in the 1994 Commonwealth Games and had ridden in a couple of World Championships without coming close to any medals. Everson didn’t make the Great Britain Olympic squad in Sydney in 2000 and, fifteen years older than me, she would not receive any funding from the new lottery-based scheme. But at least she had some experience. I had nothing on an indoor track.

      The pursuit events were different. Yvonne McGregor had won a bronze medal at the Olympic Games in Sydney in 2000. She had also won gold that same year at the World Championships.

      On my first day at the velodrome, having carefully parked the old camper van Mum and Dad had driven up to Manchester for me, I was excited to be in the same building as Yvonne and the male cyclists who had won medals at the Sydney Olympics. I had watched transfixed when Jason Queally won gold in the men’s kilo – the one kilometre time trial. Jason’s victory had marked a turning point in my life.

      In the summer of 2000 it had been a huge moment when, in the stark setting of a motorway service station, I had stood alongside my parents and a small but whooping crowd as we watched Jason race on the other side of the world. Mum and Dad were in the midst of taking me back up north when, luckily, we stopped off for a break just as the climax of the kilo was reached in the Olympics. The images beamed down from the service station television meant all the more to me because it was the first time I had actually seen live track cycling. Jason’s triumph made me tingle with the realization that I had ridden at the very velodrome where he trained in Manchester. Track cycling, from that point on, became as tangible as it was thrilling.

      Twelve years earlier I had been too young to notice the significance of Chris Boardman’s gold medal in the individual pursuit at the Barcelona Olympics. But I realized that Jason would change perceptions of cycling in this country. His extraordinary achievement, alongside Yvonne’s bronze, was bolstered by two further British medals in Sydney.

      Riding with Chris Hoy and Craig MacLean, Jason also won silver in the men’s team sprint. And then, in the team pursuit, Paul Manning, Chris Newton, Bryan Steele and a young Bradley Wiggins won bronze. Bradley, born in April 1980, was just six months older than me – but he moved in a more rarefied world. Never imagining then that I would be in contention for an Olympic medal myself, I looked up to riders like Bradley, Craig and, especially, Chris and Jason. They were gods of the track to me.

      I was too shy to really talk to them and, instead, I usually waited for them to leave the track before I went out on my bike. A morning of filing, photocopying, checking stock, writing the occasional letter and cheerfully making tea and coffee for everyone suited me and the level of my track proficiency. I would have felt an utter fraud if I had been in the way of medal-winning Olympians.

      But Marshall and Peter Keen, the performance director at British Cycling, were generous men. They wanted me to make the most of my stint at the velodrome. And so there were times when, to my amazement, I did share the track with the men. I kept my head down and tried hard not to be noticed.

      Four years earlier, in 1997, Peter had shocked many people when he had stood up at the sport’s national convention and expressed his intention to turn British Cycling into an international powerhouse. It seemed an absurd ambition for a minority sport in Britain. Sniggers echoed round the room as he reached the culmination of his snazzy PowerPoint presentation. Peter, however, had the vision to match his ambition. He also knew that young riders like Bradley and Chris, in their respective pursuit and sprint events, had the potential to become World and Olympic champions if the economic limitations were overcome.

      Peter would no longer accept a situation where a talented sprinter like Chris did not even have his own skinsuit when he made his international debut in the European Under-23s in 1996. Chris was loaned a GB skinsuit which, once the championships were over, he had to return so that it could be used the following year.

      That same year, without any funding or the appropriate facilities, Peter used his own bathroom in an attempt to create the heat and humidity Yvonne McGregor would face at the Atlanta Olympics. He always joked that he had a very tolerant wife because, working with Yvonne, the bathroom carpet went out, the rectal probe went in, the bike-on-rollers started whirring and the heater was switched to 30 degrees. With hot water running out of the bath and shower until a humidity level of 90% was reached, Yvonne could then train in the appropriate conditions.

      Pete always used to say, with a light laugh, ‘We cooked her.’ After an hour there would be a line of oil and sweat and bike-dirt going up the door, across the ceiling and down the wall because Yvonne would have lost two litres of sweat. Her perspiration hit the rollers and was flicked around the room – in apparent defiance of the fact there was neither lottery funding nor elite programmes at the velodrome then.

      In 1998, when Peter secured a £6 million sponsorship scheme, funded by the National Lottery, he reinvented British Cycling in a profound way. Bradley, who had just won the World Junior Championships, was called into Peter’s office and offered the chance to become the first rider on British Cycling’s world-class performance plan. Chris went through the door next as a cycling dynasty was laid out in meticulous detail. The first achievements of that plan emerged in those four Olympic medals in Sydney.

      Despite the lack of a women’s sprint programme, Peter and Marshall encouraged me to chase a place on a junior scheme called the England Potential Plan. They believed that, with sustained training, I had the ability to make the designated qualification time for the sprint. I had never before had a chance to really practise the line and grow used to the velodrome – and I was amazed how quickly I improved.

      There was much to motivate me as I worked in the administrative office of British Cycling, rode hard on the track and ate my meals and slept in the camper van. Most nights, in the deserted but guarded car park, I relished the quiet.

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