Victoria Pendleton met with a setback on her road to the Cheltenham Festival when her intended mount in a jumps race yesterday became a non-runner. The former Olympic cyclist hopes to get much more experience of racing horses over fences before the mid-March Festival but has not ridden in public for more than a month.
Pendleton had been due to take her first race ride of the year at Ampton near Bury St Edmunds on Sunday but the horse will be withdrawn after being found to be short of peak health at the Oxfordshire stable of Alan Hill. “According To Sarah was a little peaky this morning,” explained the mare’s owner, Barry Orr, an employee of Betfair, which is backing Pendleton’s efforts towards being a jump jockey.
Pendleton’s next opportunities will be next Sunday, when the action will be at Black Forest Lodge near Exeter, the course at which she made her jump racing debut in November. So far, she has had two rides in such ‘point to point’ races and pulled up her mount before the second-last fence on each occasion.
While she has shown significant improvement in her riding skills since she first sat on a horse early last year, Pendleton would still be very vulnerable in a competitive contest like the Foxhunter Chase, her Cheltenham target. The last running of the race featured 24 runners and was won by the very experienced and accomplished Nina Carberry, whose first winner in Britain came more than a decade ago.
Pendleton has had just one ride on each of her racecourse visits so far but Orr said the plan would now be to step her up to two rides per card if the right horses could be found and remained fit.
In a new interview with the Western Daily Press, Pendleton has discussed the extent of the challenge facing her. “I had my first ever riding lesson on 22 February last year and the Foxhunter is in two months and the thing is, ultimately, it is a ridiculously hard challenge,” she was quoted as saying. “It’s audacious, but it wouldn’t be interesting if it was an easy challenge.
“For me, cycling was always an inevitable destination. I come from a family of cyclists, as soon as I was old enough I had a bike, it wasn’t even a question and yes, when you’re good at something it’s fun to do but it was never something that I chose to do, whereas I’ve chosen to do this and it feels so different. In fact, it’s made me feel quite sad in some ways, because I was like, imagine if I’d felt like this about cycling?”