Born in Otley, West Yorkshire, the 23-year-old took up cycling only when Team GB visited her school when she was a teenager.
Aged 15, Armitstead preferred sports like hockey, netball and football, but her PE teacher at Prince Henry's Grammar School is said to have spotted something in the teenager and invited British Cycling's Olympic Talent to come to the school.
"They set up fun and games on bikes on the school field and gave people a go," Armitstead said previously.
"They saw who they thought had potential and I was one of them," she said, but insisted: "I was rubbish. I was really bad."
Since then it has not been plain sailing, but Armitstead has enjoyed a relatively meteoric rise, although her own success seems to have come as a surprise to the now-silver medallist.
"My first race that I won, I was too scared to take my hands off the handlebars and celebrate," she is reported as saying. "I was just so shocked that I'd won."
It was clearly no lucky victory. Armitstead won a silver medal in the Scratch Race at the Junior World Track Championships in 2005, she was U23 European Scratch Race Champion in 2007 and 2008, and came second in the Points Race in 2007.
In 2008 she is said to have played a key role in helping fellow Briton Nicole Cooke win the World Championships road race in Varese, Italy, as Cooke became the first cyclist to take the World Championship and Olympic titles in the same year.
The following year, Armitstead was part of the Women's Team Pursuit which won gold at the World Track Championships in Warsaw, Poland, and at the Commonwealth Games in Delhi in 2010 she took silver in the road race, as well as bronze in the points race.
The 23-year-old has notched up other notable victories, including winning the first stage of Tour de l'Aude in May 2009, and winning the best young rider classification at the women's Tour of Italy.
In November that year she won the Track World Cup team pursuit in Manchester with Joanna Rowsell and Wendy Houvenaghel.
Cooke may have been the defending Olympic champion, but Armitstead was not afraid to voice her opinion.
In September 2011 she criticised Cooke for "riding for herself" after the World Championships road race in Copenhagen.
The pair appear to have made up since then - but Armitstead found herself up there as a big name going into this year's Games.
She announced she planned to focus on road racing at London 2012 late last year, and in June was confirmed in Team GB for her first Olympics.
Writing in a blog for London's Evening Standard, she said she was expecting the news, but was again taken aback by her own reaction.
"It felt like a big weight had been lifted off my shoulders but all along I wasn't aware it had been a weight on my shoulders, if that makes any sense."
And the weight will certainly be off her shoulders after winning Britain's first Olympic medal today.
And although she was slightly rueful at missing out on gold, she showed her usual buoyant self, saying: "I'm really, really happy. Maybe later I'll start thinking about that gold, but I'm happy with silver at the moment.
"It's something very special and it hasn't sunk in yet."
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