Owen Slot charts the parallel rise of Australia’s Anna Meares and Great Britain’s Victoria Pendleton – an at-first friendly rivalry that threatened to turn ugly as the two stars rose, culminating in the ultimate showdown in the final of the track sprint at the 2012 Olympic Games in London.
THIS STORY DOES not really start in Stuttgart in 2003, but, if you rewind that far, you find a place of pleasing innocence, the calm before the storm, two girls having a drink at the bar together. And no, of course, back then neither would have dreamed of how their lives would come to revolve around each other, how a nascent friendship could develop such a bitter taste, how together they would create a rivalry so epic it would raise their sport to unimagined heights.
At its most dramatic, in the cauldron of the 2012 Olympic year, their sparring on the pine tracks of the world’s velodromes would become box office gold. But in 2003, at the World Championships in Stuttgart, Victoria Pendleton was 22 and Anna Meares was 19 – a Brit and an Aussie, two riders from opposite sides of the world, their competitive lives in front of them.
And at the end of those championships, when they had both finished competing, they had a beer together. Just a drink, nothing more. But in years to come, people – generally people in the media – would wonder how they could ever have shared even a moment’s closeness, and whether they could ever be close again. The psychology of their rivalry was destined to be fascinating.
Something small and decent happened at the Stuttgart bar that night. One of the boys spilled his beer over the jacket that Meares was wearing and, in a nice moment of girly unity, Pendleton rescued her.
‘No problem, don’t worry,’ Pendleton said, and took Meares down to the toilets to help her clean herself up. And that was all; then they were back out at the bar together. Two very decent people, neither yet with a world title to their name, twinned by a drink and a kind of a friendship and also vast, yet very differing, simmering competitive spirits.
In fact, their story really started a year earlier, at the Commonwealth Games in Manchester. That was when Pendleton first encountered Meares, though on that occasion there was not one Meares but two of them – Anna and her elder sister Kerrie.
It was Kerrie that Pendleton rode against there in Manchester, and not Anna. The young British rider nevertheless got an understanding of what the next 10 years would feel like.
Pendleton likes to think of herself as a clean rider, an athlete with an understanding and espousal of the concept of good sportsmanship. But she received a taste of what she would interpret as the other extreme when she rode against Kerrie in the individual sprint semi-final of those Commonwealths, when Kerrie, on her inside, rode her high up the steep banking of the Manchester velodrome track and used her bike to flick her against the boards.
That was just one race, just one tactic, yet the moment clearly made an enormous impression. A decade later, when Pendleton published her excellent autobiography, Between the Lines, she rewinds to those Commonwealth Games and still remembers the ‘brutal riding and bullish physique of the Meares sisters’.
Her autobiography makes it abundantly clear how large Anna Meares loomed in Pendleton’s mind.
Generally, in an autobiography of an athlete, you would expect to wade a few chapters in before encountering the career’s major sporting rivalries. But how far into Between the Lines do you have to go to get to Meares? Page two. As early as that, Pendleton introduces her as ‘my old rival, the Australian rider who so often tries to bully and intimidate me’.
How did we go from Stuttgart to that? From friend to foe? Or is it just that when two girls are headed in the same direction, towards being the best female sprinter the track world has ever seen, the clash is inevitable?
This is the story of two very different characters whose career paths seemed destined for a final, decisive showdown at Pendleton’s home Olympics.
Immersed deeply in the psychology of this rivalry is the concept of femininity. Is it feminine to be brutal and bullish? Is it possible to be a world-class female athlete and yet retain your femininity?
Does success on the world stage require a young lady to bulk up until she resembles a man more than a woman? And what about the concept of the strong woman? Femininity does not necessarily equate to weakness, does it? Over a decade, both Meares and Pendleton would go about finding their own answers. And their answers would be reflected in their success and the way they handled a bike.
When first acquainted with international competition, at the European Championships in the Czech Republic in 2001, Pendleton was disconcerted. She did not like what she saw. She saw girls with mullet haircuts and big, muscular, powerful body-frames – the Russians in particular. Some riders would try to intimidate her, make her feel little, which she was by comparison. The Russian riders would even smack her on the bum in a patronising way, to let her know that she was small and not really in the right place. This was a world of alpha females and Pendleton never felt very alpha. She didn’t appear to have the psyche or the figure of a sprinter.
Around British Cycling, she was aware of this too. She was petite and pretty and not remotely interested in morphing into the body type she was towered over by in the Czech Republic. So she would pitch up to training in mini skirts and sparkly sandals. Exactly what the likes of Chris Hoy and the other leading male riders in the group made of all this is irrelevant; what is not is Pendleton’s own paranoia, her belief that they were all judging her as a misfit.
Yet as the years passed and Pendleton’s medal collection grew, her looks became part of her tale.
She enjoyed being different; she did photo shoots for glamour mags, she posed naked on a bike. And she relished her position as a role model. Her message was simple: you can be good looking and feminine and still win bike races; the two are not mutually exclusive.
As she explained in her own inimitable way: ‘I’m still a girl and I like wearing dresses and no one wants to look like a guy in drag, do they, when they put on a frock? For every big girl out there [competing against her in the velodrome], it’s like an insult that they get beaten by some scrawny girly chick. Girls have looked at me as if to say: “How the hell did that beat me?”’
When growing up in Brisbane, Australia, a very different mindset was taking hold for Anna Meares.
She was never petite and she grew up acutely aware of that fact. Being an Aussie, hers was an outdoors life and trips to go swimming or to the beach made her self-conscious about her appearance; rather than dress down to bikinis or swimsuits, she would go the other way and cover up with shorts and T-shirts.
Yet as Meares grew successful on a bike and came to realise that she was commanding a growing army of followers, she started to take her position as a role model seriously, too.
‘I slowly realised the effect I can have on people,’ is how she explains it. ‘I love being involved in sport because it shows kids a different stereotypical image of what it is to be a strong woman. It’s not always about being skinny. It’s about your presentation and your confidence and everyone is unique. It’s accepting that you are different and being proud of the qualities that make you different. The women I compete with are strong, powerful women, who have curves, muscle and confidence. If that message is something I can give to kids, I’d be really pleased.
‘I got teased a little bit when I was a kid because I had a big butt, but I put it to good use. It’s difficult when you are young girl, and you see all the magazines and the beautiful girls in bikinis, and you just don’t have that physical confidence. But as I have grown up, I’ve realised: I have a big butt, I don’t have the model physiology and it doesn’t bother me. It makes it hard to find jeans, though!’
Meares laughs as she says this. She is, indeed, very happy within her own skin. But the contrast with Pendleton is striking: two female world stars, two different messages, one saying that it is okay to be small and pretty, the other saying that it is okay if you are not. Yet not far from all this was the assertion, from Pendleton, that one thinks that it is okay to ride like a brute and the other does not.
This all came to a head in a single Keirin race at the World Championships in Bordeaux in 2006 when neither Pendleton nor either of the two Meares sisters qualified directly for the final and had to go through the repechage round, where two of six would go through. It didn’t help, either, that Simona Krupeckaite, the talented Lithuanian, was in the same race. This was a very classy field.
And as Pendleton would soon realise, it was also stacked against her. Two on one: a pair of Meares sisters in what Pendleton calls ‘a brutal plan’ and ‘a calculated assault’. It was not very complicated, either. Anna’s job, it seems, was to sacrifice her own ambitions for Kerrie by taking out Pendleton. Thus, when Pendleton mounted her first attack, Anna, in front of her, swung her wheel right, nearly knocking Pendleton from her bike and into the advertising boards.
The manoeuvre required some agile, high-speed bike-handling from Pendleton to stay upright, but it certainly succeeded in taking her out of the race, and it got Meares relegated, too. Pendleton was livid. Meares attempted to apologise, but Pendleton, in a cool, controlled fury, said: ‘Don’t talk to me.’
But that was really only the culmination. As she makes clear in Between the Lines, Pendleton had long been preoccupied with her Australian rival. At the World Championships the previous year, in Los Angeles, Pendleton was rattled with self-doubt.
‘I did not feel I deserved to be there,’ she writes. ‘A rider as unforgiving as Anna Meares would demolish me. How could I face her down when I felt so vulnerable?’
Los Angeles, however, was to be Pendleton’s launchpad; it was there that she won her first sprint world title and she beat Meares in the semi-final in the process. Yet her description of that semi-final win also tells a story.
‘I was in the World Championship final,’ she writes. ‘I had won, at the very least, a silver medal. But it mattered more to me that I had the sprinter’s scalp of Anna Meares.’
* * *
What is it that drives a world-class athlete and then keeps on driving them? The psychology of Pendleton versus Meares is fascinating. Meares: comparatively balanced. Pendleton: an athlete so openly vulnerable who, at her lowest, would self-harm, cutting herself with nail scissors. Yet in one way they were closely twinned: they both grew up chasing a family member who was their better.
Pendleton chased her father. Meares chased elder sister Kerrie.
Max Pendleton, the father, was a national grass-track champion and a biking obsessive. Young Victoria grew up watching him win races and attempting to train with him on long cold rides on interminably long hills. She followed him on a bike because she found that this was the way to his heart. As a child, she never even contemplated the idea that she might be better than him.
Meares grew up in a competitive tussle with Kerrie. But Kerrie was not only older; she was naturally better. Kerrie was the kind of kid who won everything: area honours, junior national honours, headlines and attention. She was the one destined to go far. Anna was the not-so-good younger sister. At least, that is how she felt. She did not collect junior titles – she just worked bloody hard to finish towards the top of the pile. But it was the knowledge that she was not so naturally blessed that drove her forward. It drove her in everything – in school, in sports, even in competing with Kerrie for who would get to sit in the front seat of their parents’ car.
And when she broke through into the elite, it required her to clamber past her sister, too. She acknowledges how hard that was, that her selection for the Athens and Beijing Olympics required her to trample all over her sister’s dreams. Only one sister could go and Anna went to both. Kerrie eventually retired in 2010; two years on, the two sisters still hardly talk about their own rivalry.
‘It’s hard for both of us,’ is how Anna explains it. ‘It’s hard for Kerrie to see that I am doing the things she wanted to do. We have a level of respect and understanding where we are both aware but we don’t dabble in it too much.’
Yet Meares powered ever onwards. Of her and Pendleton, she won the first Olympic gold medal, in the 500-metre time trial in Athens in 2004, but after that event was scrapped from the Olympic programme, she found herself behind her rival in the two individual events that they would contest in London. Pendleton won Olympic gold in Beijing, beating Meares in the sprint final; at World Championship level, Pendleton would be undefeated champion every year from 2007 to 2010. Only thereafter did Meares catch her, and then, in 2011, overtake her. So 2012 would simply be a battle royal.
The fight would be waged on three battlegrounds: first, the World Cup event in London, at the new Olympic velodrome, then the World Championships in Melbourne, Australia, and then back again to London for the Olympics. From Pendleton’s home turf to Meares’s and back again, the heat turning up a notch every time.
In London the first time, they traded blows. Pendleton showed promising form, Meares then beat her 2-1 in their semi-final in the sprint, while in the Keirin they were both so busy watching each other that nether got on the podium.
That was an interesting start, though merely an hors d’oeuvre. They arrived in Melbourne with Meares expected to deliver on home soil and with question marks over whether Pendleton was too far past her best. Melbourne was also where the rivalry was raised, by the media, to the level of soap-opera cat-spat, the two of them seemingly eagerly helping it on its way.
Meares said: ‘You can’t have a great friendship because there is so much riding on the line for those involved.’ Pendleton then replied: ‘I’ve heard her make some comments about how she dislikes me and I dislike her.’ Even Meares’s friend and sprint team partner, Kaarle McCulloch, got in on the act, saying: ‘To be honest, I think Vicky’s a little scared.’ Often, too, there were reminders from Pendleton of Meares’s tactics and her apparent record of roughhouse riding.
That they would meet in the semi-final was a shame, albeit a kind of irrelevance. Their match-up here felt like the final and had the intensity of it, too – especially after the first race when the two clashed and Pendleton fell, hitting the deck at approximately 40mph, her skinsuit shredded so badly she sustained track burn from her hip to her shoulder.
At that stage, consensus had it that Pendleton was beaten, that for anyone to come back from that kind of a fall was a big ask of anyone. But Pendleton? Fragile of mind and confidence? No chance.
So it was inspiring simply to see her stepping out to the track to contest round two. Then, when Meares was relegated for riding out of her lane, and they were tied one-all, it was clear that there was some exceedingly special racing unfolding before our eyes. The decider raised the standard even higher: they needed a photo finish to split them, and it was Pendleton, by an inch, who was the victor.
She then won her final and Meares won the bronze medal match, but that really did seem almost irrelevant. All that seemed to count was that Pendleton had beaten Meares.
But if anyone thought that Meares was some kind of dastardly rival, they only needed to hear her comments afterwards. She was distraught, fighting back tears of disappointment, and yet of Pendleton’s crash, she said this: ‘I saw it, I heard it, I felt it. That just goes to show Australia and the world that she can pick herself up and dust herself off – and she’s a great champion for that.
‘But I do feel very proud that I have a rival who, in the end, I have to work with to raise the bar of women’s sprinting. We are two very strong, very powerful, very independent women and we are very proud of that.’
In Melbourne, Meares conducted herself with utter class. After the sprint, Pendleton’s spirit was spent; she contested the Keirin but did not have it in her to make a fight of it. Meares, though, battled on. She won the Keirin and then just kept on going. On the bill on the last day of the championships was the 500-metre time trial, which was not an Olympic event, but the fact that Meares won that, too, spoke volumes of her competitive spirit, heart and soul.
But even that was not enough. As she said: ‘The big dance is in London in a few months’ time.’
* * *
By the time Meares had arrived for the Games, the pair’s rivalry was pure tabloid fodder. Pendleton fed the newspapers with some trademark barbs; indeed, Pendleton was always their better provider.
But their apparent antipathy was such an established theme in the build-up to the Games that at a press conference hosted by Adidas, the first question to Pendleton came from an Australian journalist, who asked: ‘Anna Meares – is she a cow?’ (The answer, as it happens, was, ‘Definitely not,’ though Pendleton was never going to say, ‘Yes – she’s a complete bitch.’)
It was also well known that Pendleton was retiring after these Games, that the pair would never race each other again, that this was it: the final of finals, the end of the road, the last shot at hegemony.
The first race was the Keirin, and it was all Pendleton’s. The home girl, ‘Queen Vic’, came out faster and stronger than ever, not remotely like someone who might be past their best, pumped with confidence, too, and so quick that she felt happy to take on the race and ask the question: ‘Can any of you match me?’ And they couldn’t. Not even Meares. In fact, especially not Meares. Meares didn’t even make it onto the podium. The pendulum of power had swung completely.
It seemed at that stage that we knew the final answer to their rivalry – that Pendleton was indeed queen, the winner, the better. But this rivalry was epic because no one ever gave up, no one ever conceded defeat.
That race, Meares would say later, was the biggest let-down of her entire life. But that night, she sat with her coach, Gary West, in the food hall in the athletes’ village and he wrote down a question for her on a napkin: ‘What do you want to do?’ And she wrote back the words: ‘Keep doing what we know to do and keep on fighting.’
And so to the last fight of all. Meares was well prepared for this, meticulously so. Back at home, she and West had worked on a specific programme that they called Project Know Your Enemy.
The enemy was Pendleton and they trained every day with a male sprinter, Alex Bird, whose job was to be Pendleton while Meares learned how to beat him. This was like a boxer hiring a sparring partner to copy his opponent – and it was genius.
In the individual sprint, the good news was that Pendleton and Meares did not meet in the semi-final; this time they would meet in the final or not at all.
And in race one, Project Know Your Enemy started to come good. Indeed, the tactics for this race were the culmination of an entire decade. Meares gave Pendleton the inside line and, coming off the banking into the back straight, appeared to dive-bomb her. She shot down off the bank straight at her.
Remember, here, that Pendleton’s mind is full of images of rough-house riding and her brutish rival, because this is where Meares used that psychology entirely to her advantage. She did not ride a lady-like race, not at all; she rode exactly true to Pendleton’s mental image. So when she flew down towards Pendleton, their elbows suddenly touching, Pendleton’s response was to swing upwards to protect herself, and in that split-second, completely instinctive decision, Pendleton lost the race.
She would beat Meares to the finish but, in swinging out of her lane, she earned herself a disqualification. Meares’s move was brilliant, and it had worked.
Was this good sportsmanship? Meares was unmoved by the question. ‘This is a sport,’ she said. ‘We’re not out there to have a cup of tea.’
Now 1-0 up and confident, the Australian had something for the second race, too. She knew that Pendleton was phenomenal at chasing, winning by coming off her opponent’s wheel, so she wanted to test her by making her go ahead. Thus, after leading her out, Meares suddenly stopped. It is not unusual to halt on the pedals like this in a sprint, but it is as late into the race as Meares did it.
Pendleton, caught by surprise, had no alternative than to come past. It was that or fall off, and suddenly her own plans were in disarray. From that point, she led the race, but with little conviction, and Meares zipped by her comprehensively in the sprint to the line.
‘I knew three weeks ago that I was going to do that,’ Meares said. It was a plan that worked to perfection. The gold was hers.
And that is the end. Kind of. One-all. One gold each. The spoils shared. But it seemed they were both glad it was over. Neither had the appetite for any more. In Pendleton’s case, not ever. But although they had scrapped stupendously for the week, the year, the decade, they also recognised their debt to one another.
Meares would never have been as great without Pendleton. And, likewise, Pendleton was elevated to greatness by her desire to beat Meares. Together, they lifted their sport.
In the context of track cycling, this was as good as Ali-Frazier, Ovett-Coe or Borg-McEnroe. This was as good as women’s track sprinting had ever been. A golden era. Only at the end, when the fighting was done, did they realise how much they needed each other, and reflect on what they had done for each other.
In the London velodrome, when you await your medal ceremony, the medallists sit downstairs, out of sight, under the track. It was there that a kind of respectful truce was finally declared; they were down there waiting for a long time, around 20 minutes, and the subject of conversation was wedding dresses. They talked about Pendleton’s forthcoming wedding, and Meares’s wedding the previous year. They laughed together.
And there, you wondered the extent to which they really had disliked each other, or if they simply spent 10 years climbing on each other’s shoulders to get even higher. For under the London velodrome track, sitting, waiting, the two great rivals became girls again, just like they had been in that bar in Stuttgart a decade before.
Owen Slot is the chief sports reporter for The Times. He has written five books, one of which he believes is the only children’s book ever written on the subject of Keirin racing. Despite completing the 2007 Race Across America, he was never offered a professional contract as a rider.