Few dispute that Nicole Cooke is the most talented British woman cyclist of her generation, but integrating her into the heart of Team GB's structure has proved to be one of the toughest challenges of this golden era.

Cooke, partnered by Sharon Laws and Emma Pooley, will lead the three-woman team in tomorrow's 126-kilometre road race. The 25-year-old from South Wales has won the British road race title eight times, the women's Tour de France and Giro d'Italia, the World Cup and Commonwealth Games. But, while contemporaries such as Jason Queally, Bradley Wiggins and Chris Hoy have savoured Olympic gold, Cooke lacks that experience. Despite her other numerous victories, it is the one that she covets the most. That might explain why she has separated herself from Team GB's happy band in the build-up to the Olympics.

Just as she did in Athens four years ago and much to the frustration of Team GB's management, Cooke has gone her own way in preparing for Beijing, by skipping Team GB's pre-Games camp in Newport in preference for training in the Italian Alps.

In Athens, Cooke drew sharp comments from her team-mates when she opted out of the Olympic village in favour of a private apartment. Her father, Tony, made almost as many headlines as his daughter when he was detained by the Greek police after painting her name on the Athens streets on the eve of the women's road race.

Anglo-Australian rivalry intensifies

The Sports Minister has laid down a bet with his Australian counterpart over who will win more medals

• Sir Steve Redgrave helps Tom Daley prepare for big stage

• Great Britain's 'skeleton' rowers punch above their weight

• Lucy Fairbrother and Iain Thom return with promises of more Tibet protests

Multimedia

• Simon Barnes in Beijing

• Bring back the tug-of-war

• Top 100 Olympic athletes of all time

Related Links

• British cyclists face world elite in opener

• Emmons still caught in the crossfire

This year, after she joined the Team GB co-sponsored Halfords Bikehut concern at the start of this season, the emphasis was on better integration into the Britain structure. Heat-chamber preparation in Newport was seen as a key part of this process. But it seems that the mercurial Cooke has again shunned the Britain bonding experience. “There has been some disappointment, because she went to Italy and not Newport,” Chris Boardman, a Team GB technical consultant, said. “But we can't tell her what to do. She's an independent person who goes her own way, but that's also why you sometimes get fantastic results.”

After finishing a frustrated fifth in Athens, Cooke will be among the most motivated on the start line tomorrow, but Pooley, the recent winner of the Tour of Brittany, and Laws, highly successful this year in her own right, also have the ability to challenge for medals.

Laws, who finished ahead of Sara Carrigan, the defending Olympic champion from Australia, while racing Down Under in January, has fully recovered from a leg fracture in June, with Boardman assessing her fitness at “100 per cent”. Laws and Pooley will use their climbing skills to wear down powerful rival nations such as Australia, Germany and Italy, but it is the last-minute inclusion of Marianne Vos, the former world champion and World Cup winner from the Netherlands, that may give Cooke the greatest pause for thought.

Concerns also remain over the impact of the Beijing “fog” on athletes competing at such intensity for several hours. “There is no way to acclimatise to dirty air,” Heiko Salzwedel, the Denmark cycling coach, said. “The best thing to do is to avoid it altogether for as long as possible.”

Boardman, however, believes that for some riders, smog might be preferable to sunshine. “We might be better off like this,” Boardman, the Olympic medal-winner who has painful memories of the brutal humidity of the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, said. “There has been some sunshine today and that made it really hot. Apparently, the pollution can have a cumulative effect, but then if you're really susceptible you wouldn't be an elite athlete, in the business of turning over oxygen as efficiently as possible.”

Nicole Cooke

Born: April 13, 1983

Lives: Glamorgan, Wales and Lugano, Switzerland

Sponsor:Team GB-Halfords Bikehut

Began racing in 1994 and 2008 is her seventh professional season

Career highlights: Won national road race title at 16, (youngest ever champion) and has won that title on seven further occasions; 2000 and 2001, World Junior road race champion; 2002 Commonwealth Games road race champion; 2003 World Cup winner; 2004, winner women’s Giro d’Italia (Giro Donne); 2006 and 2007, winner, women’s Tour de France.

Olympic record: Fifth in Athens road race in 2004.