Secondary school life was jam-packed with lots of interesting and worthwhile activities. Brynteg School is a large comprehensive on the south side of Bridgend with over 1,700 students. Its alumni include the current First Minister of Wales, Carwyn Jones, distinguished scientists such as Professor Keith Burnett, who became Oxford University Professor of Physics, and a host of sportsmen and women. Well, to be fair, mainly sportsmen such as rugby stars JPR Williams, Gavin Henson, Rob Howley, Mike Hall and many others. Lynn Davies, yes that Lynn who won the Olympic gold medal in the long jump at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, was a past pupil and teacher. At Brynteg, my childhood heaven continued into the teenage years, with everything any youngster could want.
In my first year, in the summer of ’95, the school PE department put forward a few boys and girls to the county borough ‘Champion Coaching’ scheme. This after-school event was another athletic festival, like those with Mum and Dad, but on this occasion we had everything – hurdles, high jump, javelin, even a real discus. I was riding my bike the six miles to school, so after lessons my friend Rhianne Biddescome and I would walk my bike down to Newbridge fields, in a beautiful setting alongside a river with a bridge across it.
There were three coaches. Senior coach was Roy Anthony, who had coached Tanni Grey-Thompson. Roy was assisted by Ridley Griffith and Rob Howley, who was playing for Bridgend at the time and would later captain the Wales rugby team. Roy told us that the sport of pole vaulting developed from people having to cross rivers. With Roy standing in the middle and Rob and Rigley on either bank, the masterplan was that we boys and girls would run at the river, pole firmly and confidently grasped, time the entry of the pole into the centre of the river with great precision, and hold the pole as we sailed serenely from one bank to the other. Rob and Rigley gave a demonstration and then it was over to us, with predictable results. We all got soaked. Roy was superb, most times grabbing the pole and helping us on our way to make up for lack of speed and timing. We sprinted, jumped upwards and lengthways, threw javelins and the discus, and we had water fights with Rob and Rigley. What a delightful way to learn together: sport for the sheer innocent enjoyment of it.
Sport was only one of the many fun and worthwhile things with which I was filling my life. Whatever the task put in front of me, it got done to the very best of my ability, whether that was poor, satisfactory or excellent. In the main hall in Brynteg is the Roll of Honour. Pride of place goes to the list of those pupils who receive the award of Rankin Scholar. This is given, each year, to a boy and a girl in Year 13 (the upper sixth) who has attained the highest level of academic achievement in the school. Straight ‘A’s and marks of 100% at A-level are de rigueur. This is a very big school, with a lot of clever pupils who leave to go to the best universities in the world. Each assembly, I would look at the Roll of Honour on the board by the stage and see one boy and one girl for each year. I am extremely proud that my name is on that list, in that hall. ‘Rankin Scholar’ is something I put on my CV, alongside World and Olympic champion. It wasn’t all about cycling and nothing else, but also about becoming a rounded and balanced person. Qualifications are just as important as any gold medal, as a sporting career can be cut cruelly short.
I loved my teachers and I loved school. Being Welsh, we have our own language and own cultural festival. At school, we had the Eisteddfod – a festival of singing, dancing, acting, and playing musical instruments on stage together with competitions. Craig won the boys’ contest for the ‘off stage’ competitions once, and I did likewise for the girls’. Music was not my strong suit and I apologise now for all the hard work my music teachers put in with me over the years, for such modest results. We got that exam grade but it was very hard work and the violin is somewhere in Mum and Dad’s loft. They always wanted to go out when I practised.
Brynteg encouraged you to be independent and resourceful. At first, together with my friends we competed in all sports. Gradually it narrowed down to just cycling and athletics. Some experiences speeded up that process. Hockey was wild and crazed. That very hard ball hurts, but not quite as much as one of own your team-mates who swings, misses the ball, but scores a direct hit on your skull. That big bump on my forehead took ages to go down.
Rhianne and I went to all sorts of athletics events together. I am proud of my distance/age group records in the district, and I hope those who break them have as much fun as Rhianne and I did. At one South Wales Championships she battled her way into the 100m final. Unfortunately, the bus taking us back to school had to leave early. The PE staff trusted us, so I stayed after my 1500m event to support her and then we cadged a lift in another bus to somewhere in the Bridgend vicinity. It had been a long, tiring day, but we just walked back to school and then I rode home six miles on my bike. I wouldn’t have missed Rhianne’s 100m for anything.
Later in my school life, in 1999, I represented Wales in cross-country. We were in Ireland for the Home Countries International and Mo Farah was running for England in the same age category as me. The Welsh team oozed inferiority; we were there as pack fill. In the girls’ race, I think England had seven runners in the top ten, maybe even better. I was competing as one of the best in Wales, but it was not a sporting highlight of my life. Mo might remember four feisty Welsh girls coming up to him and engaging in the typical things young boys and girls do when going abroad. We certainly weren’t going to stick in anybody’s mind because of our athletic performances. I could see that at a higher level, an athletics career was never on the cards, as I was always going to be beaten by athletes taller and skinnier than me.
I was proud of my school, teachers and schoolmates, and I remained on call for duty at all times. In the summer of 2000, as I pressed for a place in the Olympic team, it was my final sports day and I was going to sign off from 13 years of school sports in style. It was my final sports day. I wanted ‘N Cooke’ to be engraved on the Senior Victrix Ludorum trophy. It’s there now, a few lines below ‘S James’, after Sophie had also won the prize.
So how did I get to be good at cycling?
Firstly, I rode to school every day, even though the bus to school stopped just 50m from our house. Dad had changed careers and was now a teacher at a school on the other side of Bridgend. He was used to riding in to work every day, he did it before I joined him and he still does it today. Rain, snow, wind, hail and shine, we rode in. Initially, it was just a steady ride and the shortest way to school; then as I got stronger and my interest in racing developed, the pace got harder and we added hills to the route, including riding down to Southerndown Beach, and doing a U-turn in the car park so we could ride back up and add another hill to our route. Craig was two years my junior at school and when he joined us we now had a little pack. Every day, we finished with a sprint on a wide deserted road. It was full bore, we gave it everything.
Later, as we became more serious about race preparation, Craig and Dad were more often a leadout train, occasionally joined by the odd renegade sheep that had strayed onto the road. Craig would cover 1.3km to 600m, Dad 600m to 200m, myself the last 200m. The sign of the Volvo garage in Ewenny marked the finish line. Every day. While in the glorious days of summer riding down to the beach was entrancing, in winter, with a force 10 gale, it had its own charm. As the trees were bent alarmingly by the onshore south-westerly wind, so we would be ‘echeloned’ and leaning at nearly 30 degrees to stay on our bikes, each gust trying to blow us across the road.
An echelon is when a rider does not ride behind the leading rider, but because the wind is from the side, they ride half behind and half to the side, in order to gain maximum shelter. The idea is that after a period on the front, the lead rider swings off, to move to the back of the echelon and so another rider is on the front. The slope of the echelon depends on relative road speed and wind speed and direction. Some mornings, behind Dad, the echelon was nearly 90 degrees when he was on the front. However, the most important aspect of that daily ride was exactly that: it was daily. The physicality of the ride is one thing. The resilience it taught you was another altogether.
Punctures were a regular occurrence. This was the countryside, hedges needed cutting and the fragments easily pierced bicycle tyres. Chains broke, cables broke, axle spindles broke. A lunchtime walk to the bike shop in town was a common event, so Hayden and Stuart at the shop became great friends. If I didn’t have the money on me, I could come in a couple of days later and pay then. Going to school, we were with Dad, but on the way back, we were on our own. Eleven years old, stuck at the side of the road, in the wind and rain, trying to put a new inner-tube in, heightens the senses. Sometimes there were long walks home, but mostly it was a lot of fun.
Even though we were riding practically the same roads every day, there was always something different to notice: the sheep on the common, seeing them with their newborn lambs, then the lambs growing up; the trees blossoming in spring, then in full leaf followed by their vivid autumn colours; riding along by the coast watching out for the massive waves crashing over the rocks, whipped up by gale-force winds. The seasons and life cycle went by each day in front of Craig and me, as we rode to school and back. The sun shone on us and we rode in short sleeves. It rained, it was icy, we crashed. We slid in the snow on our bikes. When the snowfall was very heavy we would walk through the deep drifts, perhaps with our bikes on our backs, only to find the school closed. Great news! We could go back and slide some more on our bikes on the big hill, then go sledging. We added more hills, more miles, and the sprints became ever fiercer. We did our homework, we got our grades. We rode home quickly to share with Mum and Dad our latest news. We marvelled at the world around us.
During that first summer of races back in 1994 at the Ajax cycling club, we did a couple more time-trials on the tandem before the end of the season. After chatting to club members, we found out that there would be a series of winter cyclo-cross races in South Wales every Sunday morning, which meant I could continue my competitive activities during the winter.
It was around this time that I started keeping my scrapbooks. These record detailed accounts of those races as if I was my own cycling correspondent. There were also hand-drawn maps of the courses and notes on my main rivals, things I must do to prepare for the next event and how to improve – the skills I should practise in one of the disused quarries nearby and so on. Some of British Cycling’s ‘world-class’ coaching staff of the time could have learnt quite a bit from studying the level of detail recorded in preparation for the next event in the U12 South Wales calendar.
The Welsh U12 Championships were held in December, and in my scrapbook I describe it as ‘my first serious event’. I’m not sure too many people would agree with that description, but I defy anyone to tell an 11-year-old that the Welsh Championship they are engaged in is not serious. In the life of that 11-year-old, it was a turning point. I beat the boys, who were undoubtedly stronger than me, and beat them with technique and wits. I felt on top of the world, even though I was wet and muddy with a jersey down to my knees, standing on a podium in front of a stadium. Over the years, I have kept in contact with both lads with whom I shared the podium. When I won Beijing gold in 2008, Jason Price even put the photo of our U12 medal ceremony on his Facebook page. They are both smashing lads.
For each race, I had to remove the carrier and mudguards from my bike and then, on returning on the Sunday afternoon, put them back on, ready for my school bags the following morning. Again I learned to be independent and self-reliant. Mum and Dad regaled me with tales of the comic book character Alf Tupper, the ‘Tough of the Track’ from The Victor. Alf was an independent amateur athlete who competed despite the system, a welder who was always mending and fixing things. That was us. One time, after Dad had watched me struggle up the muddy slopes in a race, he cut out two steel plates, welded two short bolts to them and attached them to my trainers to provide some grip at the front. Dad did lots of things like this, all the time.
Normally both Mum and Dad took us to races, but sometimes it was just Mum. She drove, while I pretended that I could map read, and then when we got somewhere near the venue, we asked lots of people for directions. Craig learnt to keep quiet in the back if the tension got too high. One Sunday, Dad took me to Abergavenny, I remember it well because I forgot my helmet and the organiser loaned me one for the race. It was the day my lists went into overdrive. Thereafter, I always had a list, checked for content days before, and then packed my kit well before departure time, with every item ticked off. Strangely, it worked every time.
On that occasion, Phil Jones the Welsh coach was there. I won the U12 race and afterwards Phil spoke with Dad, who was expressing his personal concerns about cycling. Dad was aware of his brother Chris’s experiences and was not at all sure about the sport. Chris Boardman had won the Olympic track pursuit in Barcelona ’92 and now was in the middle of his rivalry with Graeme Obree. These were two very different characters, with two very different ways of approaching the same event, but there was only one corner the Cooke family were backing. We had listened as the Union Cycliste International (UCI), cycling’s world governing body, came up with rule changes overnight to ban Graeme and his hand-made bike at the World Championships. We heard the radio report that stated UCI president Hein Verbruggen had stood in the track to try to stop Graeme, and Graeme had ridden at him. Verbruggen’s colleague, UCI vice-president Ian Emmerson, who was also president of the British Cycling Federation (BCF), was implicated in the betrayal of Graeme and years later was ousted in a coup at the BCF amid a whole range of allegations from both sides.
Apart from Robert Millar, now coming to the end of his career, and Chris and Graeme, British prospects looked quite slim at this time. Colin Sturgess had seemed a great prospect but why hadn’t he gone further in the sport? Something was wrong. If Britain was any good at coaching and supporting cyclists, there would not just be Robert Millar on TV, there would be other British riders. The odd maverick, with talent, ability and a stubborn refusal to bend to the will of others, appeared to be the only Brits who made it in cycling. Products of a system, they definitely were not. Were the British riders no good or was the system broken?
Dad was pouring cold water on the whole show. However, Phil was eloquent and assured. ‘I know how you feel and agree with you that it was like that, but the sport has changed quite a bit. Nicole has talent and I think you should let her try.’
Phil pointed out the changes that had occurred in cycling. The first women’s Olympic cycling event, the road race, had been introduced in 1984, and events were gradually being introduced at the Olympics, World Championships and Commonwealth Games. While there was still a huge way to go, changes were happening each year. By comparison with when Dad and Uncle Chris were racing, women’s road events were now moving towards reasonable distances, rather than token races which were not long enough to allow the classic tactics of road racing to unfold. Phil was also able to point to the fact that his wife, Louise Jones, had won the first women’s sprint event when it was introduced at the Commonwealth Games in Auckland in 1990. There was now a Tour de France and Giro d’Italia, and although the format was continually evolving it was clear that compared with just over a decade before, when there had been no women’s cycling events at the Olympics and the sport was really a no-go area for any aspiring female, it now offered opportunities. Dad was still not wholly convinced, but gradually introduced me to the things I would need to do to succeed.
The first thing I needed, clearly, was a proper bike to race on, as I was riding the heaviest and cheapest bike among my U12 rivals. Dad scoured the small ads in Cycling Weekly as clearance bargains and sales became our lot. Still at home are the remains of a job lot of top-quality 18mm racing tyres Dad bought for £2 each at the time. The retail was something around £45 each. We purchased a second-hand Brian Rourke frame in superb condition. It needed a group set to kit it out. My birthday was coming up and I had a brand new, not quite bottom-of-the-range, Campagnolo group set for my present. The spirit of Obree and the ‘Tough of the Track’ was everywhere. A little later in my career, we made contact with Brian Rourke, and I would later win world titles on his hand-built bikes. Together, we would take a leaf out of Graeme Obree’s book and, being of a smaller build than a 12-stone man, we designed frames with narrow bottom brackets and other features suited to me.
Anyway, I now had a bike, I had become a member of ESCA – which was a great organisation run by fantastic people – and at the age of 12, I could now ride time-trials on my own. I rode a season of club time-trials. It was 15 miles there with Dad on a Friday night, ride the 10-mile TT and then 15 miles home. On Saturday mornings, there was a track session at Maindy in Cardiff and about once a month there were mountain bike races where I could use my school bike. There was a lot to try and sample.
Things were looking good, but there was still so much to learn about road racing. I was fascinated watching the Tour on TV. Road racing was the king of sports, it had everything. I now view it as having three equally weighted contributing factors: the physical capability of the rider, the technical efficiency of the bicycle and equipment, and the tactical moves and counter moves at both individual and team levels. Failure in any one of the three can render any amount of supreme talent in the other two irrelevant. I was riding to school, and so developing physically as best I could, but I needed to develop tactically.
Laws in the UK stipulate that cyclists who have not attained the age of 16 are not allowed to ride on the road in massed start events – i.e. road races. There was, at this time, only one closed road circuit in the UK built for cycle racing, at Eastway in London, and very few other closed road racing events put on throughout the year. Those that existed would attract tiny fields of sometimes fewer than ten riders. As a result, no British youngster under 16 was any good at road racing. There might be somebody who was British champion, but that person would be totally outclassed on the world stage. Nobody was going to be any good because there was absolutely no chance of developing any sense of tactical awareness until you were 17, and by then all the continental youngsters were so far advanced that no British rider could catch up. British road cyclists were pack fill. It wasn’t complicated to work out why.
We weren’t the only people to recognise this. The senior coaches at ESCA understood, and each year they took groups to events in Holland. These weren’t just races for equipment nerds to compare crank lengths and discuss tyre pressures or tread patterns. They were exactly what youngsters needed and exactly what I wanted. They were holidays with games and fun, with some cycle races in the day – and did they know how to put on a cycle race! This was a world of cycling completely different from how the sport had developed in the UK.
The Helmond Youth Tour was a five-day event, extremely well organised and catered for youngsters of all ages, in just the same way our games evolved on the green at Wick. Children were split up by year of birth. The youngest, Category 1, were going to be aged eight that year. The oldest would be 15 for the girls and 14 for the boys in Category 7. We were in teams, but not grouped by year. A team was one child from each category, so the little ones were integrated with the big ones. We had an adult team leader and all eight of us, seven riders and our team leader, slept in a very basic but entirely satisfactory dormitory together. There were games, treasure hunts and discos. It was everything under the sun for a week, at a giant hostel set in lovely grounds. For the cycle races, the rules were superb – simple, yet entirely effective.
This was not like the adult sporting world, this was more like that primary school sports day, where boys weren’t ‘better’ and therefore girls ‘worse’; here, both were treated equally and, as a consequence, there were nearly as many girls as boys. To even up the racing, girls would ride with the boys of the year category below. Every competitor had to ride a single-speed bike, no gears were allowed and the ratio was limited to something small, so that the strong boys could not simply use brute force to get away from the rest of the field, they had to use tactics. The idea was to work with others, form breaks. The fields stayed together, not scattered in a collection of individual time-trials as I’d witnessed in my first races in the UK. The finish was always a group sprint; you needed to think about where to be on the road, who to follow and when to start to sprint.
There was more. The bikes had to be low-tech. No carbon fibre, no fancy frames, no deep section. Wheels had to be conventional flat aluminium rims with a minimum of 32 round spokes. Back home, you might turn up and race against some boy with a £3,000 replica 1992 Lotus, the bike Chris Boardman rode at the Olympics, but the environment was entirely different at Helmond. Parents who sought to use their wealth to buy advantage for their offspring were trumped, and being those type of parents, they went and found another sport where money could buy success. Cycling in the UK was encouraging the ‘arms race’ and so killing the sport, with many leaving, not having funds to access superweapons. In Helmond the exact opposite was taking place.
We certainly raced to win, but winning just meant points and the difference between a win and second at the top age group only had the same effect for the team as the rider coming 23rd or 24th in the eight-year-old category. With only one category competing at any one time, all the rest of the team would be rounded up by the team leader and encourage their representative to do their best, wherever they were finishing. Games and other fun things sometimes had competitions with points that were of identical importance as well. Each day there was organised relaxation and time for unorganised relaxation, with everybody trying their best to communicate in Dutch, Belgian, French or English. There were treasure hunts in the woods when it got dark. This was as far removed from my first experiences going away with the GB team as it could possibly be. This was fun.
This was an activity holiday for children centred on cycling. It was run with stages, so there had to be a yellow jersey. And if there was a yellow jersey, there was also a polka dot jersey. In fact, it was all like a mini Tour de France. Each day, three jerseys were given out to the leader of each competition in each age group, plus jerseys for the leading team in the combined ‘cycling plus games’ competition. On the final day, the suburbs of Helmond were converted to the Champs Élysées. There were motorbike marshals to create a proper race convoy, a giant ‘jury wagon’, a large lorry with offices on the back, to park up, do the photo finish and provide a centre for commentary and music throughout the day. Hearing my name over the loudspeaker in Dutch and my exploits explained to the crowd and the very good-natured crowd cheering, whatever it was that I was meant to have done – this was child heaven! Everything they could do to make this like the Tour de France for youngsters, they did. We watched as each category raced its final stage, with its own sprint. I did my race. I had not won the hill climb, but came second. The winner was in yellow, so as the next rider in the ‘mountains’ category, I was able to wear the polka dot jersey, the jersey I dreamed about. I even got to take it home – what more could anyone want?
Each year I went back and each year I developed. It wasn’t a place for many British riders. The winners in the UK tended to be those well involved in the ‘arms race’, and with that degree of parental investment came parental control and direction. One British champion went to Helmond to win. He was under strict instructions not to participate in any of those energy-sapping things like games, water fights or, heaven forbid, the disco. While all the rest of us ran around, screamed and rolled in the grass and danced, he lay on his bed alone. He only went once. He did not win.
Similarly, just as it was not the place for a certain type of rider, neither was it the place for certain types of coach. The ESCA coaches who took us were highly experienced and were also technically accomplished in the sport of cycling. However, they also joined in the whole theme of making it fun for the children. These were not the type imbued with an extravagant view of their own self-worth; these were kind, considerate and trustworthy individuals. I went to Helmond year after year. Mum and Dad never came and one phone call home in the whole week was all that they requested, just to say I had arrived safely. Beyond that, they waited to learn all the news of the racing when I returned. Walter Rixon, Geoff Greenfield and Ron Dowling were our ESCA coaches – absolute stars, every one of them.
The sport was littered with coaches at the other end of the extreme. I’ll recall another episode, well ahead in chronological order from our story now, just to illustrate the difference. It was an ESCA residential training weekend. I was towards the older age range, and there were the younger ones with us, aged 10 and 11. There were a couple of the ESCA stalwarts, Geoff and Ron. There was also this guy (I will save his blushes) who repeatedly told us he had worked at the British Cycling Federation’s Manchester track. He worked with the ‘important track men’ and one day, if we listened carefully to everything he told us and did everything the way he told us to, we might just get to join that elite group. Unlike Geoff and Ron, he wore his tracksuit top and fancy outfit and posed in it, puffing his chest out as he continually berated virtually everyone. He repeatedly blew his whistle and demanded we come off the track and gather round him, straightaway, to hear him share his latest valuable gem that was going to turn us into the next star.
The little ones started it that night, ‘bobby knocking’ on his door and running off. We bigger ones were summoned out of our rooms and told not to do it. Our protests of innocence fell on deaf ears. It continued. We were called out again: could we please stop it. Well, that was the last thing he needed to say. I’m not sure how much sleep he got that night. Adorable Walter, Geoff and Ron were never troubled with such tricks, and we never saw that coach again. If only, later on in life, we could have rid ourselves of totally useless coaches and staff so easily. A night of ‘bobby-knocking’ – well worth the investment! A few door numbers would have been on my list. The 10- and 11-year-olds, all on their own, could spot what was wrong with this guy. They didn’t need anyone telling them.
Over the years, ESCA had taken the very best British youth cyclists across to Helmond. Most were, of course, boys, and the odd girl tagged along. A couple of surprise stage wins taken against the grain was not much to show for ten years of trying. My experience at Helmond inspired me. Despite the handicap of living in the UK, I came back determined to give my utmost, applying myself thorough preparation, hard work and smart tactics to show that Britain could produce winners to match those who I had met there.