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Pendleton warns drivers to watch out for cyclists!

Olympic gold medallist Victoria Pendleton has urged Britain's motorists to be more bike aware and less abusive to cyclists. In an interview with The Timesonline she reveal that she has been on the receiving end of plenty of abuse and dangerous driver herself – even while training in her Team GB kit.

“It does my head in that people have no regard for my safety. If someone cuts me up, I will sometimes catch up and have a go at them. It's not like their journeys are so important. They're usually off to the shops to waste some more money. Honestly, what's a few seconds in their pointless life for the sake of not killing me?”

Pendlton who is campaigning to get more Briton's on their bikes (she is one of the faces of next weekend's Sky Sports London Freewheel) is adamant that raising driver awareness is key to giving more people the confidence to get out on their bikes.

As she know even experienced cyclists are no match for a careless driver. In the run up to the Commonwealth games Pendleton's team mate, Emma Davies-Jones had her back broken by a hit and run driver on her way to the Manchester Velodrome, and although she made a remarkable recovery and went on to win a bronze medal in Melbourne, before the accident she had been aiming for gold.

Pendleton's solution for safer streets is more bikes, and she has a suggestion for increasing driver awareness: make sitting on a bike and having a car whizz past at 50mph part of the driving test.

In a refreshingly honest interview Pendleton says that one Olympic gold isn't enough. She also pays tribute to the part the British cycling team's sport's psychologist, Steve Peters has played in her success, particularly in lifting her performance at the Athens Olympics. It is not underplaying it to say that Pendleton regards what he has done for her as life-changing in quite a profound way.

“Steve could see I was deeply unhappy and unsatisfied with my performance, because I was not doing it for the right reasons. This was more about my life, so the work with Steve was more psychiatry than sports psychology. I had some real bizarre perspective on what I was and who I was in my sport. I felt my life depended on cycling and my results. He taught me to care less about other people and more about myself. People say it's surprising about how much happier and more confident I am…”

It's an approach Pendleton feels would benefit lots of young girls and women.

“The concepts Steve taught would help four out of five girls in everyday life. If I had known these things at 14, I would have been much more happy and less full of teen angst. I was always so self-conscious about being boyish as a teenager that I would never be seen in a swimming costume.”
To read the full interview with Victoria Pendleton go to the Timesonline

road.cc's founder and first editor, nowadays to be found riding a spreadsheet. Tony's journey in cycling media started in 1997 as production editor and then deputy editor of Total Bike, acting editor of Total Mountain Bike and then seven years as editor of Cycling Plus. He launched his first cycling website - the Cycling Plus Forum at the turn of the century. In 2006 he left C+ to head up the launch team for Bike Radar which he edited until 2008, when he co-launched the multi-award winning road.cc - finally handing on the reins in 2021 to Jack Sexty. His favourite ride is his ‘commute’ - which he does most days inc weekends and he’s been cycle-commuting since 1994. His favourite bikes are titanium and have disc brakes, though he'd like to own a carbon bike one day.

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Mynydd.Mawr | 15 years ago
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To be fair, most drivers will give you a wide enough berth, but it only takes one in a three hour ride, or even one a week, to make you wish your bike came with RPG's as standard (front and rear launching, preferably with idiot seeking guidance systems).

This evening I rounded a left hander on a country lane while taking a quick after work spin to be confronted by a huge silver car doing about 70 on the wrong side of the very narrow road. Not nice at all. If he / she hadn't seen my lights and taken a very wobbly dive back to their own side of the bleedin' road, I'd have been in the bushes, or on the shelves in Waitrose as human pate (I like to think I'd make Waitrose anyway, rather than the Tesco Value range).

These things happen too often and simply because too many people drive at speeds above and beyond their ability as drivers. Putting every driver (not just learners) on a bike while someone shoots past them at 60mph leaving a foot of space is an extremely good idea.

rant rant rant rant angry shouting etc.

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thebikeboy replied to Mynydd.Mawr | 15 years ago
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Country roads can be scary all right, you often seem to get people (locals I presume) who drive too fast into blind bends and who don't seem to have considered that there might be something coming the other way, maybe because most of the time there isn't, but that just makes them complacent, stupid, and very dangerous.

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