Victoria Pendleton
The Mid•Point with Gabby Logan
The Midpoint
4.3 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 2 June 2026
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Gabby' s guest today is one of Britain's greatest ever Olympians. Victoria Pendleton is a nine-times world champion cyclist who won gold at two Olympic Games — and then, just to keep things interesting, retrained as a jockey, attempted Everest and walked a high wire over the Olympic Stadium.
Victoria has never been someone who stands still. She has a new book out called The Fear Opportunity, and at the centre is a powerful idea — that the things that scare us most are actually the greatest opportunities we have to grow. But this book is also something much more personal than a self help guide, and Victoria talks with real openness today about the experiences that shaped it.
She is a brilliant Midpoint guest because her whole life has been about pushing through fear to discover what you are truly capable of — and she has learned some hard lessons along the way that she shares with extraordinary honesty. This is an inspiring, moving and honest conversation. Victoria's book The Fear Opportunity is out now and is published by Bluebird.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the midpoint. My guest today was a poster girl for the 2012 London Olympics, a serial winner and supreme sportswoman. We all fell in love with her. In an incredible career littered with cycling world titles and Olympic gold medals, she appeared to have it all to have conquered the |
| 0:21.3 | sporting world. When the time came up to hang up the cleats, Victoria Pendleton seemed to |
| 0:26.6 | discover that the highs and routine of professional sport were quite difficult to emulate in everyday life. |
| 0:32.1 | She threw herself into a series of reality challenges, strictly come dancing and SAS Who |
| 0:36.9 | Dairs Wins, and also learned to be |
| 0:39.6 | a jockey with very little equine experience. And doing those kinds of shows and having those |
| 0:45.7 | kind of experiences showed a vulnerability which we'd previously not seen in her glittering sporting |
| 0:51.3 | life. And she's since talked about her mental health challenges. |
| 0:55.5 | Her marriage to Scott Gardner, a sport scientist, she'd worked with at British cycling, |
| 0:59.0 | ended in 2018, and in 2023, her twin brother James died from a brain tumour. And then last |
| 1:05.0 | October, her father Max died from Parkinson's disease. Unsurprisingly, she's had to learn a lot |
| 1:10.6 | about herself |
| 1:11.4 | and how to keep on moving forwards when big life events happen. |
| 1:15.5 | Her new book is called The Fear Opportunity, |
| 1:17.8 | and I'm sure all of those life experiences have fed into this book. |
| 1:22.3 | And she hopes the book will help us all turn fear and anxiety |
| 1:25.6 | into a catalyst for growth and reposition fear, |
| 1:29.0 | something we shouldn't try and inoculate ourselves from. Let's go chat to Victoria. |
| 1:34.7 | Victoria Pendleton, welcome to the midpoint. Thank you for having me. Do you feel like you're at |
| 1:39.2 | the midpoint of life? I think I'm past the midpoint, to be honest. Because you've lived such |
| 1:44.0 | a full and successful life. I've I'm past the midpoint, to be honest. Because you've lived such a full and |
| 1:45.4 | successful life. I've achieved more than I ever thought that I would. That's the genuine truth. |
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