For those looking for a new hero

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May I suggest you take a long hard look at Victoria Pendleton:

The 2004 Athens Olympics provided Pendleton with her shot at redemption. She travelled to the Games hopeful of making the podium but awoke on the morning of the sprint qualifying rounds and completely froze. “I felt like I was in a dream,” she says, “and that I wasn’t really there. I couldn’t push myself hard enough; I couldn’t feel it; it was like nothing I had ever experienced before. I blame myself for putting the pressure on. People were talking about me as a medal chance and I had set my mind on it and when I didn’t, even vaguely win a medal, I was devastated. It was hard. I nearly quit. I honestly thought that I couldn’t deal with it; I just cried for about three days.”

Steve Peters, the psychiatrist who works with the British team, slowly unravelled the knots and sent her to the beach. “If it wasn’t for Steve I don’t think I’d be cycling today,” she says. “I had no faith in myself, absolutely none, but he encouraged me to see past it and use it as experience.”

Eight months later, in March 2005, she travelled to Los Ange-les and won her first world championships title in the sprint. It should have felt like the greatest day of her life but when she looks back now, she’s not sure. “It was a strange sensation,” she recalls. “I was pleased obviously and thought that I deserved it but I didn’t really feel that . . . proud.”

“How do you explain that?” “I don’t know,” she says. “I almost felt that it was lucky, and that maybe I had won because I’d had a lucky day and everyone else had had a bad one, which is a bit ridiculous I guess.” Source: www.timesonline.co.uk

Don’t even get a brother started on black dresses and spanner wrenches…

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About big jonny

The man, the legend. The guy who started it all back in the Year of Our Lord Beer, 2000, with a couple of pages worth of idiotic ranting hardcoded on some random porn site that would host anything you uploaded, a book called HTML for Dummies (which was completely appropriate), a bad attitude (which hasn’t much changed), and a Dell desktop running Win95 with 64 mgs of ram and a six gig hard drive. Those were the days. Then he went to law school. Go figure. Flagstaff, Arizona, USA

18 Replies to “For those looking for a new hero”

  1. Guys–

    In automobile racing, they have a saying: It’s better to be lucky than good.

    You go, Victoria.

    Mikey

  2. There’s a black dress in that picture?????????????

    Not a very big one, but there is a black dress in that picture, mostly behind the woman “wearing” it

    Opus

  3. I’m not sure what’s hotter, Victoria in the black dress or that gorgeous Bridgestone TT bike.
    Seeing that logo is like drinking with an old friend.

  4. How’d she pull off looking sexy? most track sprinters look like East German Drug experiments….(I know, dated reference). In spandex most are downright scary looking. Let’s see if she looks like a sack of hammers when she stands up.

  5. Okay, went to the timesonline site….not too shabby, but good for a cyclist is the best i can say.

  6. …victoria, park the bike anywhere you like & hey, the crackers are on the nightstand next to the bed…

    …(old reference, hope it still applies)…

  7. You never know what can happen when a women gets a handlebar end nudging into her crotch.