Olympic gold medallist Victoria Pendleton has decided to step away from her most successful event, the individual sprint, and won’t focus on it again until the world championships in March.
Instead, her bid to take three medals in London 2012 means that she will put the majority of her efforts into improving her keirin racing. She will target that event at the upcoming European championships in Poland, adjusting to the tactics and sustained power needed to triumph in the derny race.
“I know I have the capabilities in the keirin, I have even won a world title before, but I don’t kid myself that I really know the event at all,” she told the Telegraph. “Now that it is part of the Olympic programme, a lot of very talented riders will be taking it very seriously as well.
“I just haven’t raced enough and on those occasions when I have raced it has been mainly for fun or at the end of a long meeting when I have been tired from three or four days competition and have not been at my best physically.”
She said that a more structured, focussed approach is needed if she is to have a chance of chasing a medal in London. Because of that, the individual sprint will be put to one side for now.
“I want to race the keirin when I am fresh – or at least fresher than before – so I have got the strength to experiment with a few options,” she said.
The 30 year old will however do the team sprint in Poland, teaming up with Jess Varnish. Olympic qualification is based on that event, and so it is important to perform strongly in that event. Pendleton could team up with Varnish for the Olympic Games, or could be reunited with fellow former world champion Shanaze Reade, should the BMX champion decide to target medals in both areas of cycling.
The limited race programme for women in the Beijing Games meant that Pendleton could only target gold in one event. She won that, the individual sprint, but the revision of the Olympic track programme means that she can also now chase top honours in the keirin and the team sprint.
While that brings greater opportunity for those targeting a single gold, it ramps up the pressure for anyone tempted to target all three. Pendleton is under pressure to try to live up to the achievements of Chris Hoy, who did the triple two years ago.
That’s an unfair position to be in, even if she acknowledges that it is indeed a target. "Having three medal opportunities is a great thing for the sport: that's the cop-out answer. If Chris Hoy hadn't won all three it would have been an amazing opportunity,” she told the Guardian last week. “But now that he's already done it, that opportunity exerts real pressure. People will expect it to be a strong possibility for me, and that makes life a lot harder.”
She admitted that stress has led to a lot of disturbed nights’ sleep of late. “The fact that I'm already having all these bad dreams about being chased is a bit worrying. I'm always being chased by a monster. Sometimes the monster is a killer or a murderer. It doesn't really matter because I know exactly what that monster is as it hunts me down. The monster's got a big 2012 written all over it.”
Pendleton is one of the most successful female riders currently racing. She has clocked up an Olympic title and taken five world championship sprint titles in the past six years. She also won the Keirin in 2007 and the team sprint with Reade in 2007 and 2008.