Cycling: Pendleton shows women how to get on right track

"Bedfordshire woman carrying the weight of golden expectation into an Olympic Games." We have been here before, of course. We would be here again with Paula Radcliffe had the pride of Bedford and County Athletics Club not suffered her latest ill-timed collision with fate: a stress-fractured femur that has left the fastest-ever female marathon runner fighting against the odds just to make the start line in Beijing in August.

Four years ago in Athens, it was another untimely injury and a course of antibiotics that beat her, depleting her glycogen stores along the road from Marathon to Athens. The poor woman must have been a serial albatross-slayer in a previous existence.

For Victoria Pendleton – the pride of Stotfold, a south-east Bedfordshire village situated on the old Great North Road, the A1 as is – the Olympic Games happen to be a sprint, not a marathon. Over the past two years the 27-year-old has established herself as the world's pre-eminent female sprint cyclist, capturing the world title in Mallorca last year and successfully defending it in Manchester three months ago.

Pendleton has acquired the mantle of favourite for gold in Beijing, where her fate will come down to the power and timing of an all-out blast for the line after a game of cat-and-mouse on the boards of the Laoshan Velodrome. It will, of course, depend on the good fortune of being fit and healthy for the day that matters most in the 1,460-day, four-year cycle of an Olympiad.

"I think it's not worth spending too much time thinking about that, because it would do your head in, wouldn't it?" she pondered last week at the Manchester Velodrome. "You can't guarantee something like that. You can work so hard for so long and you could miss out because you get ill or a bug, or something like that."

As it is, Pendleton is on course not just for Beijing but to break new ground when she gets there. No female British pedal-pusher has ever struck Olympic gold. And no British cyclist of either sex has won an individual Olympic sprint title.

Only one British woman has even made it on to the podium. Yvonne McGregor was 39 when she won the bronze medal in the individual pursuit in Sydney in 2000. Having been a cross- country runner and a triathlete of modest standard until she turned to cycling at the age of 30, the Yorkshirewoman is just the kind of hidden gem that Pendleton is trying to help unearth by lending her support to Girls4Gold, a programme run by UK Sport and the English Institute of Sport which seeks to identify and nurture women between 17 and 25 with Olympic potential in cycling, canoeing, rowing, sailing, modern pentathlon and bob skeleton.

"The Girls4Gold programme is generally looking for girls who are sporty or involved with sport currently, who perhaps haven't reached their potential or who have maybe not found something that suits them best," Pendleton said at the launch on Wednesday.

"It's helping to direct them into something that would be the best opportunityfor them to be involvedwith Great Britain and to compete at the Olympics.People might think that it's too late for 2012, but it was less than four years after Shelley Rudman tried out for the bob skeleton that she won a silver medal at the Winter Olympics."

Rudman was a track athlete, a 400m hurdling rival of Nicola Sanders, the World Championships 400m silver medallist, before her sporting career started going downhill fast, in successful fashion. As for Pendleton, cycling was always likely to be her game. Her father, Max, is a talented club cyclist and she was nine when she rode her first race, a 400m event on grass at Fordham, near Colchester.

Eighteen years on, she is Victoria, imperious sprint queen of the cycle track. Not that she receives due public recognition for her world-conquering efforts.

"Oh, I could walk down the street and no one would know who I am," she said. It was the same for Reg Harris, the great British sprinter who won Olympic silver in London in 1948 and whose memorial bronze statue overlooks the south curve of the Manchester Velodrome, Pendleton's training base. When he was in his sixties, he jumped a red light on his bike and was pulled over by a policeman, who enquired: "Who do you think you are? Reg Harris?"

For details of Girls4Gold, visit uksport.gov.uk/girls4gold