The Olympic legend’s mental health battle is a reminder of the darkness that can descend when a sporting great’s career ends
There were no tears when Victoria Pendleton won her first Olympic gold medal. There was no great emotional climax, no comforting sense, in the aftermath, that her life was now complete. She did not even really feel like celebrating. “It’s like a big anticlimax anyway,” she confided a year later. “I mean, how could you achieve your dream? You don’t plan for the next day. In the morning it’s like it never happened, like you’re reading about it in a comic book. When you’re in that adrenaline-fuelled environment you take in so little … so it’s not easy for it to feel real. I went there with a job to do, I did it and left.”
It does not seem fair that, after all that effort, Pendleton should have found so little lasting joy in her reward. She said when she first retired that she was looking forward to living without the stress of training and the strain of competition. But like so many sportspeople the former Great Britain cyclist has since suffered agonies of the soul and she has spoken about them with candour and bravery. This week Pendleton revealed the frightening yet too credible truth that she had, last year, contemplated suicide.
Related: Victoria Pendleton reveals she considered taking her own life
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