But the fascination of Pendleton, never more honest as she enters her fourth decade, lies in how seamlessly she can switch her default setting from tranquil to tortured.
One second she can be speaking with all the confidence of a woman who has the words “Queen Vic” etched on the frame of her bike; the next she will be unpacking all the reasons why she detests the experience of racing. So it proves again when, in the middle of discussing her gym sessions, she breaks off into a heartfelt and faintly resentful description that she is “starting from zero” at this summer’s London Olympics.
“At times I think, 'How on earth am I going to do this?’ And with it being a home Games, it almost feels like everything I have ever done before counts for zero. 'Wipe that slate clean, it counts for nothing.’ It feels quite harsh. I know it will set the tone for my entire career.”
Public expectation, stoked by memories of eight British golds in the Laoshan velodrome and by an unprecedented surge in cycling’s popularity, is already eating away at Pendleton: “There’s no escaping it, ultimately. It would be nice just to knuckle down and train, but nobody can forget what it’s about. Around you, everything is totally geared to 2012. 'What are you going to do?’ 'How many medals are you going to win?’ It will only increase.”
Exploring the giddy high of 2008, when she eclipsed her arch-nemesis, Australia’s Anna Meares, to seize gold in the women’s sprint, she cautions against any talk that a repeat is likely in London. “Beijing was a unique scenario, in that lots of our athletes were physically at their peak. They were at the right age, had the right level of experience. It all came together. It was a singular point in time, exceptionally rare. I don’t think it will ever be replicated.
“A lot of people who don’t understand sport think that we have a finite amount of talent, which we can just pull out on any given day if we choose to. 'Oh, there we are, I’m in the best in the world still!’
“It’s nothing like that. It takes so many years of planning. Every week has to be exactly the same, you don’t ever take your foot off the gas. There’s so much behind that one performance. You can’t just bring it if you feel like it. It’s not a question of, 'Hey, there’s a competition next week, do you feel like riding? You could be a world champion.’ I couldn’t do that.
“Until you understand how much training and preparation goes into that one performance, I think it’s hard to comprehend. People have this fairy-tale image of what athletes are.”
VIDEO: Pendleton's moment of glory
Pendleton, with her penchant for spangly dresses and for pouting in front of the cameras in various states of undress, is assuredly no athletic automaton. She received a ribbing from her British team-mates for one especially revealing sequence of shots she did recently for FHM. In a further concession to a girlie image, she has a tendency to lose herself in watching marathon repeats of Downton Abbey while confined to foreign hotels. But the training regime on which she is about to embark sounds positively military in its structure and discipline.
It illuminates why, in cycling’s traditionally male-dominated environment, Pendleton has stayed so tough for so long. Centred initially on the world championships in Melbourne, in early April, her programme then builds remorselessly towards the defining denouement in London.
“It is all mapped out. Until this point, I had only been doing foundation work, because I suffered a lot of injuries. I had to get my muscles tolerant to the training levels. Now, I’m working more on finding my maximum strength. The reps are coming down in the gym and the intensity will be going up. I’m doing lots of weight sets, just to push what I can possibly cope with physically.
“It’s horrendous, because I am essentially 'in a box’. The gym work can do a lot of damage and it means that, for a time, performing on the track is much harder. You need to do a lot of work that complements it: maintaining track speed, shape, acceleration, working the legs as fast as possible. Then you attempt to turn that into something more explosive.
“The power you develop originally, but then you need to make the muscles functional. So, before the worlds, I’ll probably spend a few weeks focusing on speed work only. It will be really high-cadence, 'over-cadence’ even, taking my power and expressing it as pure speed. It is all a matter of aerodynamics, how I hold myself on the bike, the gear selection I’ll choose. There’ll be a great deal of testing. Finally, I’ll go back into my max-strength phase, repeating all those rituals as I head closer to the Olympics.”
Does part of her relish this deeply systematic way of living? “Yeah, I love it. I’ve always had a very regimented lifestyle. I really thrive on it. When I do retire I’m probably going to be in pieces. I’ll have to write plans for what I’m going to do with my days. If I genuinely had the capacity to continue for longer in this sport, then I would. I love the consistency, knowing exactly how you should feel every single day of the week. On Mondays you feel pretty sketchy, and Wednesdays are a bit of a struggle despite knowing you’ll have time to recuperate in the afternoon. Thursdays are excellent! That’s my life.”
Pendleton is also profoundly happy at home with her fiancé in Wilmslow, Cheshire, although her self-doubt is such that she is almost frightened to look beyond her point of Olympic reckoning. “The contrast, depending on the outcome, is so massive that you can’t think about it. The only thing I can say is that I will definitely be getting married. Where I live, where I move to, what I do with my life is all really dependent on how well those races go.”
At last year’s European championships in Holland, this balance between serenity and corrosive fear was manifested over the course of the same three events she intends to contest in London: the keirin, the team sprint with Jess Varnish and, of course, her beloved individual sprint.
Toute seule, she was once all but invincible in that brutal examination of the 200m sprint, garnering five world titles and prevailing in Beijing over China’s Guo Shuang by well over one-tenth of a second. But in the sleepy Dutch town of Apeldoorn, a certain fragility emerged as she lost to Lithuanian rider Simona Krupeckaite, compounding the unease she harboured over her two defeats in 2011 to Meares. Around and around the warm-down track she rode, looking desolate. True to form, she would purge this anguish with a triumph in the keirin, courtesy of a performance that GB coach Shane Sutton labelled “beautiful”.
Pendleton shows her glamorous side in a magazine photo shoot (Photo:Thomas Nützl /Harper’s Bazaar)
It was fair to conclude, though, that Pendleton had underlined her ingrained antipathy to the ordeal of race day. Thoughts of London have merely sharpened the sensation. So urgently do the Games loom in her head that she started having nightmares a year ago about being chased by a monster with the Olympic circles. According to her account, it has “2012” branded all over its hideous form. “Eurgh, I don’t enjoy it at all,” she admits. “I like training and the process of it, because it’s a slow build. You can follow a graph. Numbers don’t lie. But when it comes to competition, all that goes out of the bag and it’s a case of 'I’ve arrived at this, let’s see what we can do.’ Suddenly, you’re totally out of control. You’re nervous, your head’s on the block. You’re adrenalised by it, you’re heart’s pounding out of your chest. You’ll have a dry mouth and you won’t have slept properly for days.
“All that is normal, I guess, because you want to do your best. You want to express what you have trained for. It’s tough. You don’t want to let anyone down, especially not yourself.”
She once claimed that her greatest fear was of disappointing other people. Here, Pendleton swats away the notion that this could happen in London with a spot of nervous laughter. “I’m going to try my damned hardest not to. Ha ha!”
The terror is tempered, at least, by the realisation that she has already accomplished more in a decade of professional cycling than she had ever considered possible. “When I became world champion for the first time in 2005, I couldn’t believe that I had actually done it. You never know whether you will be able to or not. You can train as hard as you like – it’s not like revising for an exam, where you can be asked anything and know you are going to pass. You never know if it will be right on the day. It can always go wrong.”
Ferociously goals-orientated, Pendleton has reached the point where London appears to her to be “the only goal that’s ever going to matter”. She explains: “An Olympic gold is an Olympic gold, but I think one at a home Games is worth a little bit more, because it is so hard to do.
“I appreciate other athletes who have won medals at their own Games, but sometimes the pressure just seems too much. It’s almost like a double gold. The strength of personality it takes just to manage that, to produce the performance that you deserve – it’s a lot. It’s a big ask.”
The burden of national anticipation rests heavily even on Pendleton’s hyper-conditioned shoulders. “I can’t change it,” she shrugs. It’s way bigger than I can do anything about. And it’s not going anywhere. You either learn to deal with it or you don’t. I won’t say it’s easy to feel like your whole person is based on one result, one race, one day of your life. I feel like it’s more of a pressure than a privilege, if I’m honest.
“I’m sure that once I get there, it will all be terribly exciting and wonderful. But at the moment I just want to get it right.”
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