As bitingly cold Thursdays in February go, it wasn’t bad. One of three
nominees, Nicole Cooke travelled from her home in Switzerland to attend The
Sunday Times Sportswomen of the Year awards in London. Before that and as
part of her work with the charity Action Medical Research, she had visited
Imperial hospital in London and spoken with doctors running research into
premature babies.
She loved the banquet, as it was an opportunity to spend the afternoon with
Denise, her mum. The awards ceremony was also an opportunity to reflect
again on what had been a remarkable year for the best female athletes in
this country. Consider for just a moment some of the Olympic heroes: double
gold medallist Rebecca Adlington, gold medallists Christine Ohuruogu, Vicky
Pendleton, Rebecca Romero, and, of course, Cooke herself.
There were other women who crossed new frontiers in 2008, most notably Hayley
Turner, the young jockey who became the first lady to ride more than 100
winners in a calendar year. To achieve that mark, in some races Turner had
to defeat Ryan Moore, Jamie Spencer, Seb Sanders and Frankie Dettori. Not to
mention the prejudice that says a female jockey isn’t as strong as her male
counterpart.
Why should Cooke have been the star in such a year? The answer lies along the
road she has travelled, not the 79-mile route in China’s capital city on
that Sunday in August but the long and uncertain one that preceded it. This
was a young woman whose three A grades in her A-levels could have earned her
a place in any university in England but who, at the age of 18, chose to
leave home in south Wales, relocate to Italy and begin the adventure that
had its climax in Beijing.
Cooke’s gold medal was Britain’s first in Beijing and coming in the
ever-so-difficult road race, it precipitated unbridled joy. She slept with
the medal those first nights and it kept her awake. When euphoria courses
through your body, splashing energy in every direction, there is no
tiredness. Through the waking hours, it was the thought of not resting on
her Olympics laurels that transcended all others.
She left the Olympics a few days after her participation ended, disagreeing
with Tony, her dad, who advised her to stay and savour the joy of the
closing ceremony. Instead she travelled back to her base in Europe and was
training in Italy two days after leaving Beijing. The world championships
were just six weeks away. What is it that makes a young woman so determined
to be the best she can be, all the time? To resist the distraction of great
success, and think only of the next race? To her, it didn’t seem a
sacrifice. “I knew I had the chance to win the world championship. After the
Olympic road race, it was like, ‘I can do it now, I’ve finally cracked it’.
I just felt this incredible motivation, so I spoke to Andy [Walser] and
Fabio [Bartolucci], the two guys central to my training, and they said,
‘Okay, let’s go for it’. I never wanted to look back and think, ‘You were
partying when you should have been preparing for the world championships’.”
A four-time junior world champion, Cooke had never won the senior world
championship road race. No man or woman had ever won the Olympic road race
and the world road race in the same year. She had ridden brilliantly and
with relentless determination to win the Olympic gold medal. Her performance
in becoming world champion at Varese in Italy less than two months later may
have been better.
SHE has said her goodbyes to Denise, who will make the train journey home to
Wick in south Wales, and she is in a taxi to Stansted for an evening flight
back to Pisa, heading for her home in Lugano. Yes, a good day. So many times
she had been at the Sportswomen of the Year awards and always the
bridesmaid, the nearly woman. And then to get it right in Olympic year, to
produce what you knew you always had when you most needed it.
The euphoria still ebbs and flows, washes over her on afternoon such as this.
Even the morning visit to Imperial hospital had left a deep impression. When
she was 18 and blessed with those three grade As, cycling was both her
passion and her saviour. There was nothing else she wanted to do, no
profession that appealed to her, no university course that enticed her.
Without the ambition to be the best woman cyclist on the planet, she would
have been lost.
“This morning’s visit to Imperial hospital, it was amazing. I just found it
inspiring. Here you had a team of highly qualified people, studying
premature babies, watching what happens as they develop. I don’t know how to
say this properly but I would like to do something useful with my life after
cycling. That sounds horrible because it suggests my life in cycling is not
important, when it is. I have always loved the act of cycling my bike and I
always will.”
“But when it is over, could you see yourself spending six years at medical
school?”
“Not until this morning. Seriously, I watched this morning and had a sense of
how rewarding it would be to work as part of a medical research team, going
into the unknown for the purpose of finding out things that would make a
difference to people’s lives. It’s something that goes beyond sport, an
insight that I never saw coming. I didn’t dedicate myself to cycling so that
I could visit hospitals, but it’s happened this morning and I found it
inspiring.”
How do you know what’s coming when your dad encourages you to ride a bike,
then go on bike rides and even though he is regarded as the enthusiast, it
is you who are in his room at 6.30 in the morning? “Dad, are you coming or
are you not?” and reluctantly he agrees because if you want it that badly,
he can’t say no. She called it “pushy daughter syndrome” and was grateful to
have a willing dad.
They went on holidays, Dad and Craig on one tandem, Mum and Nicole on the
other. Park the car in Ely, 15 miles north of Cambridge, each with one
pannier for two weeks of clothes and toiletries and then all along the
Norfolk coast, down into Norwich and the car still there when they returned.
Mum, it should be said, never had to pedal very hard, not with Nicole
driving at the front. What they most admired was that through the love
affair with the bike, she didn’t neglect the important things. She was
always an A-student.
And old beyond her years. At 17, she was good enough to represent Great
Britain at the Sydney Olympics but cycling’s rules forbid anyone under 18
competing at the Olympics. It baffled her that her own governing body in
Britain would not fight her corner. That was perhaps the first setback of
many.
When she started in Italy, she shared a room with two eastern European
cyclists, both teammates. One evening they matter-of-factly injected each
other with some kind of substance. Cooke’s eyes were opened and, since then,
she has refused to close them. Cycling has a doping problem that ebbs and
flows but never goes away. A few days after those injections, she spoke up.
“Don’t do things like that in my room again,” she said. “I don’t like
needles, I don’t like it.”
To get to the top, she would have that to contend with as well. From her
second season in Europe, she was clearly the most talented cyclist but she
couldn’t quite win the biggest races. The world championship road race title
eluded her, she was fifth in Athens, and it always seemed the gifted and
gutsy Welsh girl was destined to suffer on the most important days; hurt,
tactically, by a desire that sometimes made her spend too much energy too
early and hurt, also, by the lack of a strong British team.
But, in 2008, that changed. The starting point was an operating theatre the
previous autumn and surgery to correct a problem in her left knee. Hopeful
it would be straightforward, she was distraught by the continued pain in the
joint when she restarted training two months later. Briefly, she considered
giving up competitive cycling but how could she turn her back on what had
been the purpose of her life?
Gradually the pain disappeared and slowly, fitness returned. By now the
Swiss-born frame-builder Walser had become her boyfriend and Bartolucci was
her coach. Walser calmly said he wouldn’t feel any different about her if
she did or didn’t compete at the Olympics and she was reassured by that.
Bartolucci said there were always better ways to train, little things she
could do to help her knee along.
And they suggested she not worry about the early-season races, use them to
train, concentrate on preparing for the race of her life on August 10 in
Beijing. Then, when she did it, there was an astonishing outpouring of
emotion.
“Why did it mean so much?” “There had been people who thought I was doing the
wrong thing through the year, in terms of my training and preparation. That
view even came from people as close as my father and my brother, who know me
as well as anyone will ever know me.”
“What was their argument?” “I don’t really want to go into it, but they said
at different points that what I was doing was not filling them with
confidence. Basically, they thought there was a better way and I had to say,
‘I’m working with people I believe in and this is the road I’m going to
continue on’.” Tough for a woman of 25 but for all the intelligence and
gentle charm, there is a steely backbone. She did what she felt was right
and understood how much was riding on it.
Through the suffocating London traffic, her taxi crawls towards Stansted
airport. The one-hour journey takes two and a half hours. It used to be Time
that waited for no man, now it’s Ryanair. She misses the flight and as she
disappears into the evening light, you are left with one thought: if only
she’d had her bike.
