'It was quite humbling, an experience I'll never forget - it was right up there with being in the Olympic velodrome'

Greatest Ever Festival Moments - No. 15
Victoria Pendleton proves the doubters wrong

Over the next 15 days we’ll be counting down the greatest moments in Cheltenham Festival history – the victories that brought the house down, the stories that are still told years later, those races you can watch back for the hundredth time and still find them giving you goosebumps.

Most will have great horses or great jockeys at the centre of them. The first race on our list has neither. Yet it’s only once that the Cheltenham winner’s enclosure has been compared to an Olympic velodrome – and all for a jockey who wouldn’t have been in it but for the fact her extraordinary story demanded the normal rules be ripped up.