When Britain’s double Olympic cycling champion announced earlier this year her intention to become a jockey, there was a good measure of scepticism in the reaction it provoked.

Jockey Sam Waley-Cohen, when asked about the prospects of Victoria Pendleton excelling in horse-racing, commented: "The big difference [between cycling and racing] is that a horse can think for itself and a bike doesn't," he said.

But her performance this week in her first licensed outing in a 13-runner flat race at Ripon Racecourse in North Yorkshire, as she rode the 14-1 shot Royal Etiquette to the narrowest of defeats on a photo-finish, offered convincing evidence that this is a sportswoman still aspiring to an elite level in a new sporting environment. Pendleton did not look happy or relieved to have finished. She looked cross about having been beaten…

The result earned the woman who has two Olympic golds and a silver an immediate measure of respect.

And respect doesn’t come any higher than from A P McCoy, the lately retired multiple champion Jockey, who tweeted: “I thought Pendleton did very well in her first race in public, a great achievement in such a short time.”

To which Pendleton responded: “I am overwhelmed with this, thank you.”

She will now continue, emboldened, in pursuit of her highly ambitious aim of riding at next year’s Cheltenham Festival.

Even though she may be in an entirely different sporting world to the one in which she dedicated a decade in pursuit of the highest levels of achievement, the mental tools which enabled her to succeed at Olympic and world level, again and again, carry over. And they are redoubtable tools.

A few months after the 2008 Beijing Games, at a gathering of 80 promising young sports performers in a Youth Sports Trust camp at Loughborough University, I had the privileged glimpse of the working practices of the man who has moulded the minds of Britain’s all-conquering cyclists over the last decade, Dr Steve Peters.

Pendleton and six-times Olympic champion Chris Hoy are among many competitors who have paid tribute to his ability to help them cast out the negative and optimise their performances.

Peters made a point of saying that he was not a psychologist, but a psychiatrist who worked in hospital medicine before taking up his full-time position with British Cycling. If you want to get technical about it, his full title is Dr Steve Peters MMBS MRCPsych BA PGCE Med (medical)  Dip. Sports Med. Consultant Psychiatrist/Undergraduate Dean Sheffield Medical School.

Oh yes, and he’s a former World Masters 200m champion too.

Other than that, however, just a sad under-achiever…

Peters explained to the youngsters present that their brains had different compartments. The conscious part of them at the front of their heads sat alongside a section deeper in their head which contained, in his phrase, "a chimp". This chimp is the instinctive force which countermands positive efforts with mutterings of defeatism and doom.

The cyclist wants to put his body on the line in the hectic and dangerous environment of a steeply-banked track filled with brakeless machines going pell-mell.  The chimp chips in with comments such as "I can't do this" or "I'm going to break my neck".

What Peters specialises in, he maintained, is "chimp-management."  His expertise lies in getting sporting figures to get their unruly chimp under control, or, if this proves particularly difficult, putting the chimp away into a temporary box.

What he terms "gremlins and goblins" lurk elsewhere in the brain, ready to inform the aspiring sportsman or woman at the crucial moment that they feel terrible, and that they are going to lose, and that everything is riding on this one moment.  They too can be eradicated or quelled.

"Chris Hoy knows his chimp very well," said Peters. "He has gone on record as saying his achievements are all about 'boxing the chimp'. Victoria Pendleton is one of my best pupils. She used to get extremely frustrated about dealing with her 'chimp'.

"Several years ago we timed how long it took her to get completely in control of her feelings before competing, and it was one hour and 20 minutes. Nowadays she can do that in five minutes."

This is the chip already installed somewhere in the Pendleton brain. It’s hard wired, and effective. But only in the field of performance. And as Pendleton, who is one of Britain’s more candid high-performers, has since said, there are other factors which come into play for an elite athlete which even Peters’ mind-training cannot control.

You’ve done your event. You’ve won your medals. You’ve had the open top bus parades. You’ve been to Buckingham Palace to collect your gong. You’ve appeared on Strictly Come Dancing.

So…what next?

For sport’s high achievers, once they come to the end of their sporting careers, the advice offered at many of London’s Underground stations becomes crushingly relevant: “Mind the Gap.”

“Mind the Gap” between your world class achievements and the rest of your life.

Coincidentally, Loughborough University was and is a favoured location for an organisation set up in 2009 which seeks to offer elite athletes a bridge to the years that lie before them, an organisation established by someone perfectly qualified to recognise the parlous need – double Olympic champion Kelly Holmes.

Over the last six years the Dame Kelly Holmes Trust has offered a range of workshops and programmes designed to show those who have excelled in sports that there is a meaningful path to follow.

Athletes don’t get any higher in profile than Holmes or Pendleton. Yet both have admitted being taken aback by the void opening in their lives once the years of superhuman, focused effort have suddenly become a matter of historic record.

Pendleton admitted she was “relieved’ to retire after delivering the expected gold – and a silver – at the London 2012 Olympics. But she also admitted that her new freedom left her feeling “lost.”

That was exactly the word Holmes used when she appraised her situation after finishing her career at the height of acclaim in 2004.

While Holmes has poured her energies into creating an organisation that will reach out and support others in that situation, Pendleton, 34, has decided to give a sporting career one more spin of the wheel – in a new environment.

She said in March that she had been offered the chance to learn to race horses under the auspices of Yogi Breisner, the Team GB’s equestrian guru who trains Zara Phillips, and that she leapt at it.

‘I wouldn’t have been allowed to do it before,” she said. “Horse riding was on the “no” list, like skiing. I wasn’t even allowed to go to the cinema because of germs.

“I loved cycling and was part of an awesome time in the sport, but it was a relief to leave it behind. That said, being in your early 30s and feeling like it’s over for you career-wise is frightening.

“You work so hard for something in your life and suddenly it’s over. I underestimated how much I’d miss being part of a team.”

Now she is part of one of the most mysterious and sublime teams known – rider and horse. The variations of the latter will continue to provide a series of unique challenges. But the mental schooling, and the raw need, of the former will offer unyielding positive input.

Cheltenham will be a big jump for Pendleton – but don’t dismiss the idea that it may yet happen.