Victoria Wilkinson (born 19 August 1978[1]) is an English runner and cyclo-cross rider who was a world mountain running champion at junior level and who has several times been a national fell running champion as a senior athlete.
Wilkinson displayed significant talent as a junior, winning national fell running titles at under-16 and under-18 level. She also finished second in the English Schools Cross Country Championships in 1996. At that time she was coached by her father Chris who was also a runner and cyclo-cross competitor who had won the Three Peaks Cyclo-Cross in 1972. Victoria was also advised by Keith Anderson and others.[2] Her most notable result as a young athlete was victory in the junior race at the World Mountain Running Trophyin1997.[3]
A knee injury interrupted Wilkinson’s running career and she turned her attention to cyclo-cross, in which she competed at the World Championships.[4] She was a winner of the national cyclo-cross series[5] and had four consecutive second-place finishes in the British National Cyclo-cross Championships between 2002 and 2005.[6] She finished fifth in the World Cup series race at St. Wendel in Germany in 2003.[7] Some years later, despite limited experience on the type of course, she won the Three Peaks Cyclo-Cross in 2012.[8]
She also raced cross country, finishing second in the UK Cross Challenge series in 2006-2007[16] and ninth at Cinque Mulini in 2009.[17] In 2010, Wilkinson was first in the Yorkshire Cross Country Championships,[18] second in the North of England Championships[19] and fifth in the English National Championships.[20]
In 2014, Wilkinson won the Three Peaks Race, thereby becoming the first woman to win both the running and cyclo-cross versions of that event.[28] In the running version, she set a new women's course record of 3:09:19 in the 2017 race.[29]
She set a new record at the Tour of Pendle in 2017, taking thirteen minutes off the previous best women's time which had been set by Angela Mudge in 1997.[30]