Victoria Pendleton to ride at the Cheltenham Festival

Victoria Pendleton was today given the go-ahead to ride at next week’s Cheltenham Festival.

The dual Olympic cycling champion will partner Pacha Du Polder in the St James’s Place Foxhunter Chase — the amateurs’ Gold Cup — on Friday week.

But it’s not been an easy ride for Pendleton (below), who announced the ‘switching saddles’ campaign

last March, with former champion jockey John Francome describing her as “an accident waiting to happen”.

However, Pacha Du Polder’s trainer Paul Nicholls and a team of experts gave Pendleton the green light to ride next week and her confidence will have been boosted by winning for the first time on her Cheltenham mount at Wincanton last week.

Pendleton said today: “I have always had the extremely ambitious target of riding competitively in the Foxhunter as my goal, so to be announcing that I have achieved this goal is a truly amazing feeling.”