‘Everything goes dead mad’: the strange world of sportspeak

What tense shall we use? That’s the first question autobiographers must settle. The historic present might convey a sense of immediacy. ‘I’m just one race away from becoming an Olympic champion,’ Victoria Pendleton writes, describing events four years ago in Beijing. ‘My legs have been unbelievably quiet. They lead down to my feet, and I pump them effortlessly, hard and fast, up and down, round and round.’ It proved a winning formula.

Things hadn’t always been so easy. ‘I am not the same girl who took a Swiss Army knife and used it on herself because the cutting was less hurtful than the darker pain inside,’ we discover on page six of Between the Lines. No indeed, for the ‘opening words to “Today” by The Smashing Pumpkins, ring through me’. And if she needs to check them now, there they are, tattooed on her arm: ‘Today is the greatest day I’ve ever known.