"…I can hardly feel my legs turning beneath me. I can see them pumping and pedalling, in a blur of bony knees and fastened feet, but it's almost as if my legs have disappeared from the rest of my body. Usually, in competition, my legs are in a permanent state of fatigue. A nagging weariness runs through them, telling me how often they have gone up and down, round and round, in ceaseless circles. But during these long weeks in Beijing my legs have been unbelievably quiet. They lead down to my feet, touching the pedals, and I pump them effortlessly, hard and fast, up and down, round and round. There is no ache.
In the first race against Meares these legs of mine were unstoppable. I beat her without really extending myself, winning the first in a possible series of three sprints. If I win the next race I'll have won Olympic gold – the only medal that I came all this way to take. It will be all over then, the waiting and the fretting, and I can go and find Scott. We can drink champagne and maybe even come out in the open. Then, and this rises up like an image of bliss on my static rollers, we can fly home happily.
I am going to win this race. I feel the certainty coursing through me. That arrogance goes against every neurotic bone in my body. Normally, I'm a seething tangle of doubt and insecurity. I question myself, and my ability, every pedal of the way. But not now, not today, not with my legs feeling so strong.
I feel ready. I feel like, at last, I'm going somewhere fast…"
After the prologue, we start with Pendleton as a teenage girl, trying to keep up with her father, Max, as he races away from her on their gruelling Sunday morning rides. We follow her to university and, soon, into the ferocious world of professional cycling where she insists on still wearing miniskirts with her GB top, and sparkly sandals, while the men roll their eyes at her girlish whims. She reveals what it means to succumb to despair before becoming a world champion, and then an Olympic gold medalist, before everything threatens to fall apart.
And then, of course, Pendleton fights on and wins again and again. The doubts remain, and the tears still sometimes fall, but in the end there is a sense of release and, even, a kind of freedom.
"I am no longer on a bike, going nowhere fast. Instead, I am on my own two feet, walking slowly, even happily, towards somewhere different and new. I push open the door and step out into the real world."