Cycling had become my main passion. After homework, I would find out all about the latest techniques for training and research the history of the sport. Sadly, beyond the Tour de France there was no other cycling on TV. Together with Craig, Mum and Dad we did our best to create a full and interesting racing programme. With a dearth of local road races, it became cyclo-cross in the winter and everything else in the summer, so naturally I became an all-rounder, competing with equal determination at mountain biking, road races, time-trials or on the track. I became fitter, stronger, more accomplished and more committed as the months passed. We travelled to events and sometimes observed the senior women perform. At cyclo-cross races, Dad would put a stopwatch on my laps in the youth race and then record times in the senior race that followed on the same course. The results did not need great analysis.
Riding cyclo-cross races became a family affair. Rather than simply watching Craig and me race, we all took part – Craig rode the U12s, I rode the youth race and Mum and Dad the senior race. The courses were naturally in the countryside, sometimes in woods, sometimes out on the heath and always interesting. The great British weather played its part in greasing the paths, providing many a challenge where a mistake could give you an unexpected mud bath. After the race, we would clean the excess mud off ourselves and our bikes and then pile in the car to go home, where a military-style machine would swing into action.
Mum would go to the shower first, others followed in rotation – Craig, me and then Dad. Outside, first it was take the bikes off the rack then pack the rack away. Then power washer out and clean bikes. Check bikes for damage and make a note of needed repairs. Shoes were scraped. Shoes power washed. Mud rinsed off kit. Kit put in washing machine. Bikes oiled as necessary. Power washer packed up. Bikes put into storage for the following Sunday. Mum cooked up a lovely roast dinner. When we had completed our allotted tasks – which was generally within five minutes of the last bike being put away – we all sat down and ate together, regaled each other with how our races had gone and showed each other our cuts and bruises. Dad was always falling off and wrecking equipment, even if most of the time he seemed to ‘bounce’ quite well.
Money wasn’t plentiful and economy had always been important in our house. Nothing, absolutely nothing, would get wasted. Plates were always totally clear before we left the table and nothing was cooked that wasn’t eaten. We all divided up the chores and Friday night was when Craig and I presented our job charts to Mum and Dad for approval prior to receiving pocket money. Mum and Dad were keen to support Craig and me, but extravagance in unnecessary luxuries was not on the chart at this stage of their lives. There was a dog, cat and fish to look after and two children to get to adulthood. Having a bit of competitive fun with some second-hand equipment, bought cheap, was acceptable for the time being.
Apart from the races there was also a residential coaching event, ‘Youth Week’, left over from when the sport had been far more popular in the UK, run by the ABCC (Association of British Cycling Coaches). A generation before, Uncle Chris had attended the same event at Alexandra Palace; now it was held at Easton College in Norfolk. It was very pleasant, a series of talks and lectures about cycle racing, diet, training and preparation, and each day there were several short races for us to practise what we had been taught. It was virtually all boys, with just three girls so we tended to stick together. It’s here that I met and made friends for life with Helen and her brother Greg, who would be at my side in France in 2008.
Twice more I would return to Easton for the Scholar’s 3-Day Race. Here, Helen was my great rival in a three-way tussle for victory with another Welsh girl, Anneliese Heard, who was one year older than me. Anneliese was undoubtedly a great athlete. She would go on to win the World Junior Triathlon title in 1999 and 2000. A glittering career on that stage should have become a reality. I can’t help but compare the media treatment of her and me, and the reaction of her governing body at the time. It was almost as if her undoubted success was not embraced by her governing body but used by them to galvanise their efforts to work with and promote other athletes to outshine her. On the BBC TV coverage of the London triathlon from the converted docks, Anneliese would barely be mentioned, while other athletes were hailed as stars of the future. I had much empathy with Anneliese’s position.
For the Scholar’s event, we attended as representative teams from the regions. At that time, Wales had a part-time youth coach, but with his sexist attitude, questionable driving antics and the fact that pornographic magazines were on view in his car, Dad took an instant dislike to him. Happily, Walter Rixon, one of the ESCA staff, shared the same opinion of the coach and found a place for me in his Wessex team instead. While the Welsh team were Lottery funded, the Wessex team wasn’t, which meant Mum and Dad had to pay my way, but they viewed it as money well invested. I won the girls’ section after a terrific tussle with Helen, and Wessex won the team event. Dad made himself unpopular in Welsh circles by insisting on change, but I’m glad that now other youngsters don’t have to put up with offensive behaviour that was presented to me as ‘take it or leave it’, particularly when funded out of the public purse.
By the end of 1995, I had won the ESCA national age-group titles in the road race, time-trial and grass track. The following year, I made a clean sweep of the ESCA national titles in the road race, time-trial, mountain bike, grass track, hill climb, cyclo-cross, track sprint and track pursuit. I won the U16 British Mountain Bike Championships and above all of these, where the competition was strongest, at Helmond, I went on to achieve third overall. I also won a series of Welsh age-group championships, but often there were only two or three other riders so these were of little relevance.
By now I was dreaming of a career as a professional cyclist, and I would be turning senior the year I left school. Vital to gaining a professional senior contract would be performing well at the Junior World Championships in 2000.
Dad was doing two part-time jobs, alongside his very demanding full-time employment, to fund it all. He was managing, but only just. While the enlightened souls at Helmond put a barrier on the ‘arms race’ and limited entry to virtually the cheapest bike possible, elsewhere the race to endless wind tunnel testing and special materials on different parts of your outfit, that became the ‘marginal gains’ for the track riders at Beijing, continued. I was riding a patchwork quilt of equipment. Some bikes featured hand-painted frames we could not afford to get enamelled, and a couple of bikes were of frame sizes which I never did grow into. Therefore, I needed to somehow start moving my equipment up-market.
During 1996 we had become aware that grant money was available in Wales from the Elite Cymru fund, monies from the National Lottery to high-performing and emerging Welsh sporting talent. One older boy had received enough to purchase the latest carbon fibre bikes, one for the road time-trial and another for the track pursuit. At £3,000, a bike like this was quite some support (and quite some sale for the bike shop!). No one would begrudge him funding, but the extent of the financial aid seemed to be at the expense of others. When I put in an application and got nothing, I inquired why not. The system was that applications were made and then given to the Welsh Cycling Union (WCU) to endorse, and the individual within the WCU entrusted with making recommendations to approve or reject was the newly appointed national coach, Shane Sutton.
Shane will now be with us every step of the way through the rest of this book and my whole career. Shane has achieved recent fame for his work alongside Sir Bradley Wiggins. He is highly experienced and very knowledgeable about the sport of cycling and road racing in particular. He rode the Tour with the ill-fated British ANC team in 1987. The exploits of this team are documented in Wide-Eyed and Legless by Jeff Connor, a read I heartily recommend. With team-mates such as Malcolm Elliott and support staff like soigneur Angus Fraser, the account is action-packed all the way. Some aspects are unrelated in so many ways to how the men’s Tour functions now. However, in terms of unpaid wages and weird events, personally there is much I can empathise with. He later won the British Milk Race in 1990. After retiring and becoming a coach, he then became Welsh Sport Coach of the Year in 1998, and in 2008 was UK Sport Coach of the Year. When Shane is supporting you, he is a fantastic ally to have; but when he is not, the reverse can be true. I have first-hand experience of both.
Shane advised the funding gatekeepers that I didn’t have any results to justify a grant. It seemed an astonishing thing to say, given that by this time I had won Welsh and British Championships across the several disciplines available and a host of ESCA titles, in addition to racing well in Holland. My application was rejected because I hadn’t won a BCF track or road championship, even though the BCF provided no such titles for girls. How could I get the results if the competitions didn’t exist? The Welsh boys had won some of these titles and so were eligible. They received the support, but I got nothing. Our pleas fell on deaf ears and the process left us disillusioned. We doubted that the British public, paying for their Lottery tickets, wanted it to be ‘boys only’. So we tried to get some BCF track and road championships for girls, but were told by the BCF there was ‘no demand, not enough interest’. Where would I hear that again?
And so it went on. One of the fun events of the cycling year is the Mildenhall festival. We went there often, joining others camping around the track. The Mildenhall event, although run on grass rather than cement or wood, is a track meeting and therefore held under BCF rules. In 1997, it included the British Women’s Open 800-metre Championship. We had attended the event the year before and Dad contacted the organiser, enquiring about the possibility of me riding, aged 14. The organiser suggested confirming entry with the BCF at their Manchester headquarters. Dad wrote, informing the BCF that, since there was no U16 championship for girls, I would like to enter their 800m championship event. Rather than embrace my enthusiasm, the BCF sent us a three-page letter expressly forbidding me from riding the event because I was not aged 16, that I was not as fast as the adult women, it was not ‘safe’ to ride against them; and, anyway, I did not stand a chance in the race, as if that was somehow a valid reason for not competing.
We contacted the organiser. He was aware of the decision of the BCF, but it was entirely possible for me to ride the accompanying women’s omnium that ran on the same day, which would feature an 800m handicap. Helen MacGregor, a smashing person for whom I have absolutely nothing other than the greatest respect, both as a rival competitor and as a person, duly won the British Senior Women’s Grass Track title. She was presented with the cup and the national champion’s jersey with the red and blue bands on, indicating that at that discipline, she was the No.1 rider in the country and could wear it for the next 12 months.
Later that day, we lined up for the 800m handicap in the women’s omnium. The idea of handicapping is to create an exciting event in which it is possible for every single rider to win, regardless of their ability. Always on scratch is the British champion. The handicapper had also been aware of my exclusion from the 800m championship and, having seen me race the previous year and followed my progress, placed me on the same starting point as Helen, in last place. Helen and I moved through the field together, watching one another as we overtook the slower riders. We had to keep the pace up, because the riders who had started furthest ahead were going flat out trying to get the win. I took the lead as we came around the final bend to win by a bike length. I remember punching the air with my fist to the cheers of the crowd as I crossed the line. The crowd at Mildenhall is generally very knowledgeable, very sociable and not unfamiliar with controversy. They knew exactly what was going on and appreciated the point I was making and applauded wholeheartedly.
The BCF may have been embarrassed at that moment, but they literally rolled the red carpet out at the first-ever set of British Youth Track Championships for girls the following year, 1998. I took a clean sweep of the four titles on offer: pursuit, sprint, 500m and points race. The medal ceremony was conducted with all the pomp and circumstance of the men. The presentations were not tucked away in some corner or done in silence when something else ‘important’ was going on elsewhere. All the presentations were made only when there was a break in the racing, so that the attention of the whole crowd was on the three medallists, and always the commentator introduced the occasion and personalities with dignity. Looking back, I’m proud of the 14-year-old me performing as I did at Mildenhall. Together with Dad and the BCF official, we made a change so that now British Cycling holds championship titles equally for boys and girls, on both track and road, for all youth and junior age-groups.
Meanwhile, some were asking how I could ride like that when I was just 14. Victoria Pendleton was in that race and she was older than me, and of course there was the Senior British Women’s 800m champion. What had I done to enable me to beat them? It wasn’t all the water fights, was it? The truth is I just rode my bike, a lot, because I liked it and wanted to become good. I have a work ethic that tells me, the more you do the better you are likely to become. Admittedly, that doesn’t always work, and later I failed miserably with overtraining. But at this stage of my life, where I had to sit down in school lessons for a huge chunk of time each day, there was enforced rest. The rides to school with Craig and Dad continued to be the backbone of my training programme, but we also developed a series of rides up through the hills behind Bridgend to be completed on the weekend. The longest of the rides I did regularly at this time took just under three hours, cycling up over the Bwlch, a notoriously long and hard hill, passing through the village of Nant-y-Moel, birthplace of Lynn Davies, before looping back through Maesteg and Bridgend to Wick. We were always the only cyclists on the road, just us and the sheep.
We started our stopwatches at the clock-tower in Nant-y-Moel and stopped them at the top of the Bwlch. Flat out, every time. It always hurt a lot. Each ride, you knew your form. The mid-range ride, which took just under two hours, was dubbed the Windmill because it took us past windmills on the ridges of the hills between Blackmill and Pencoed. The Coast Road ride was the shortest, which gave us the suite of distances to mix and match depending on our targets. The rides have remained unchanged over the years and our reference points for improvements marked by times collected at the same points. We raced the Ajax club time-trial on Friday nights, the track league at Maindy on Wednesday nights and some evenings we went sprint training around the deserted roads of Llandow airfield. Occasionally, I did longer rides with Craig or Dad. We would do the Ajax club 100-mile reliability trial. I was very fortunate to have such a pleasant variety of training rides available from home.
A heart-rate monitor added a new dimension. My scrapbooks were replaced with digital records with heart-rate profiles and I kept meticulous details of training rides, route, distance, wind speed and direction, and times recorded up our standard hills. I never made an excuse for myself, saying the weather was too bad, or if I had a puncture came home early, or used a short cut. I was convinced that through enough work I would eventually be able to achieve my dream of becoming the Tour de France winner, and World and Olympic champion.
In 1997, I became the first-ever British winner at Helmond. The joy of the accompanying staff and the other boys and girls with me, was exactly like that day on the sports field in Wick. My sex was irrelevant. ESCA had by now changed their name to BSCA (British Schools Cycling Association – I’m very proud of how they told us they wanted to change the name to make sure we felt included) and as Craig and I attended all their events, we engaged with other children, as did Mum and Dad with other parents, all who had an affinity for how we went about things. When the flag dropped and the race started, we gave everything. Other mums and dads saw Craig and me achieving, and following my success at Helmond I became a totem to others and the whole feel of the British group changed. The coaches became more confident and parents had more confidence in them. Others joined us around this time and followed on sharing in this new atmosphere. I was delighted that one year we mustered five from the Ajax club and a very young Ben Swift and Adam Blythe who have now moved to successful professional careers. Dad has a wonderful sweet tale of Ben coming up to him and asking what he might do to help, at the BSCA Cyclo-Cross Championships in 1999, and Ben insisting on cleaning my muddy bikes during a long epic battle. Apparently, Ben was as excited as I was that I eventually won.
By 1998, I had also picked up some sponsorship, riding for Mick Ives Cycles, in mountain bike races. Road races for girls in the UK were in very short supply, with no races available anywhere most weekends, so for the previous three years I had competed in mountain bike races. Locally, at Margam Park we have a great venue which hosts rounds of the British series. That year, Mick wanted me to ride the whole series, which was fine. There was no petrol money, and the sponsorship was limited to equipment: bike, clothes, shoes and helmet. Looking ahead, I needed commercial support, and a ‘toe in the water’ with Mick was a great place to start. I was really thrilled; this was my first ‘team’ and Mick is a genuine enthusiast. If anyone thinks I love riding my bike, this is the man who can put me to shame. You name it, if it has a bicycle involved with it, he can tell you about it. A great guy, he is still competing right now. He got together as many sponsors as he could – bottles, drinks, shoes, puncture repair outfits, bicycle locks – and all these sponsors had their names on the jersey and the team took its title from his car sponsor, Peugeot 406.
As I was to find out for myself so many times, sponsors come in two types. There are the good sponsors who sign an agreement and do what they say they will and the equipment or money arrives exactly as it should. There are not too many of those around. Thank you – all of you. Then there is the other type. They are quite keen to tell you all the things they will do, and getting the artwork for the name on the jersey is often the easy bit with them, but then something is always ‘lost in the post’. Mick’s team had both sorts, so Mum needed to keep right up to date with Mick. After the first few weeks, we were told a certain sponsor had not paid. Mick’s answer: to cover over the name or logo on the jersey. ‘Can you sew this new badge on over that name there?’ It seemed that I never raced in the same jersey twice. Names were added, covered over and taken away. It was an endurance challenge in itself. I did the odd one, but Mum was kept really busy. We have lots of great memories of those times.
Like sponsors, officials and organisers also came in different types.
In 1998, we encountered the British system and their ideas of keeping to the rule book. At this time, there were still four totally independent governing bodies for the sport of competitive cycling with jurisdiction for their own particular discipline across the UK. A single individual organiser might put on events under the rules of these differing governing bodies throughout the year, in line with the seasonal nature of the varying disciplines.
On one occasion, an organiser fell out with Dad over the rules in a cyclo-cross race. Dad pointed out what the rules actually were, but that didn’t seem to matter to this guy, who believed that his version of the rules was what counted, but then he subsequently took it out on Mum. Craig, Dad and I were away at the British Cyclo-Cross Association (BCCA) Championships and Mum, who was fitting her cyclo-cross racing around working alternate weekends, was riding the last round of the Welsh Cyclo-Cross series in order to get her minimum number of qualifying rides in the season-long league. This was run under BCCA rules, a totally independent body from the BCF. He refused to allow her to ride, quoting a BCF rule for road races that extraordinarily empowered an event organiser to refuse entry to any rider they didn’t want to ride the race.
So, after catching the train and riding from the station to the event, Mum was left standing at the side watching, before making the long journey home. She therefore didn’t qualify for the series. We were all very upset when we got back home and found out. This organiser was the secretary of the BCCA in South Wales, but when we appealed in writing to BCCA headquarters, nobody wanted to take him on. After that, we didn’t ride any more cyclo-cross events in South Wales until he was no longer secretary.
Meanwhile, I was riding the British Mountain Bike series for Mick and that was put on under the rules of the BCF. One of the rounds was at Margam Park. The BCF organised things differently from the BCCA. In their case, you made a central entry to Manchester for all those events in the series you wanted to ride. I think there were only four rounds that year and you had to ride all four to be able to qualify. We didn’t gatecrash the show. Weeks in advance, Dad wrote to the BCF at Manchester and asked if I would be allowed to ride at Margam, where our favourite ‘organiser’ was the site manager. Was he gifted the power to prevent me riding? The answer came that, as the entries were central, he was ‘not the organiser’ and so could not stop me riding. That was the good bit, but they didn’t want to upset him, so could we please keep it quiet? We did.
Next thing we knew was that ‘our friend’, who was not the organiser, had found out that I was riding and had declared, to all who would listen, that he was going to stop me, and so I would not be able to qualify. Dad rang Mick and the BCF, but nobody wanted to upset our friend – presumably because if they did he would pack up his toys and there would not be any Margam round. Happily, Dave Mellor, a BCF official who we will encounter many more times in this book, came up with the most cunning of plans. I was to be driven onto site, hidden in the back of Mick’s Peugeot van, and I was to do my warm-up on rollers in it. Then, just when they were calling starters to the line, the doors of the van were to burst open and I was to spring forth and chase after the rest just after they got going. It would all happen so quickly that our friend would not have time to pull me off my bike and he would not be able to dissemble the course before I was finished and gone from the site. Genius! Problem solved!
The Cooke family were having none of that. We told them that we would be as discreet as possible, but being smuggled into a race in the back of a van was not something I would have any part in.
There was a further problem. I needed to recce the course to find out where it went and obstacles and descents I might encounter. Although familiar with the park, different courses were used for different events. One time, a year or two earlier, we were doing our recce of the course on a Friday night. The course was not marked out and we took a wrong turn and ended up in somebody’s garden so we apologised to the housekeeper. ‘Oh don’t worry, I had the whole field in here one year, hundreds of them, the ones at the front couldn’t get back because of the ones that kept on coming up the hill!’ For this event, we suggested I just turn up, complete the recce and then leave without showering.
At the BCF, Colin Clews, who we will again meet later, was now the point of contact, once Dave Mellor’s cunning plan had been discarded. Colin was fine, and agreed this was the minimum interaction we could have. He was very good about it. We agreed timings of these visits and Colin kindly stated that he would be on hand to deal with anything, should our friend seek to do something else out of the ordinary.
So I did my recce lap on the Saturday and was back at the car changing shoes when our friend showed up, shouting and being outrageous. Dad and I left without responding in kind. Apparently he was taken home after being prevented by BCF staff from single-handedly pulling out every marker post around the whole course there and then. I’m not too sure if I ever saw him again, but I do remember that I won the race and series.
Events like this seem incredible now, but this type of thing was not a one-off. Let me finish the theme with one more example, a year forward but this time in cyclo-cross. For females, cyclo-cross had two British Championship races. The senior event was for anyone over 16, while the youth event, run with the boys’ event – with everyone starting and finishing together over an identical course in the same race – was for all males and females, aged 12 to 16. January 1999 was my last year as a youth and my last chance to directly measure up against the best British boys. Within this single race there were trophies awarded to the first finisher aged 14 and another to the first finisher aged 15. The fields were generally very good for these championships, with 40 to 50 competing. The adrenaline at the start was something to behold. That charge across the open section before the first narrowing of the course was critical. If you weren’t in the top positions, you weren’t going to figure in the results.
Two years earlier, I had won the trophy for top-finishing 14-year-old. I had beaten the boys. A year later, I was the second 15-year-old, beaten by a single boy of my age. This time was my last chance to compete with the other sex in a title event and to sign off in style. Now at 16, boys’ hormones had seriously kicked in and while I was a small girl, the best British boys were very big. In any other discipline, I could no longer be competitive, but cyclo-cross shifted the balance from brute strength to technique in terms of the mounts and dismounts, as well as the ability to control and manage the bike. I was never going to win, but to stand on the podium in third was a very real possibility. Whereas my achievement in being the best 14-year-old had been ignored, because there was no podium presentation, this would now be with the whole crowd around and they would have to see the little girl standing alongside the big boys. I was fired up, I had practised and practised across that muddy common all winter. Now I would have my moment.
It was a freezing cold January day. The trick was to keep warm by gently riding around the start area with lots of layers on and leave it until the last possible moment to line up and remove the layers. We had a nominal start time and the starter would call us to the line with a couple of minutes to go. But there was all that adrenaline running high, and some boys were stripped down to their race kit and waiting on the start line with ten minutes to go.
Dad was at the car, locking it up before coming across to collect my over-tops and leggings. I had ridden across from the car after the last lubricating of my chain. He heard the starter’s pistol fire and ran across to the starting area. He got there to see the last few riders arguing with their parents about whether it was worth starting, now that they were so far behind after missing the start. He followed the trail of my kit that I had discarded as I rode out of the field and around the course. Another dad we knew well ran across and told him what happened. Nobody had been called to the start. The gun went off and some lads on the start got going, others chased. Some had kit to take off, others just went how they were. I was quite quick to start, but then, as I was taking off a top as I was riding across the field, it caught in my rear wheel and chain and jammed. I had to get off and fight with it to pull it out of the chain and gears. There was no use shouting or screaming, I just got on with the race.
With so much single track on the course, there were only certain places I could get past the slower riders. People clapped as I finished first girl, just out of the top ten boys, but inside the fire raged. The senior official explained what had happened: he had brought a good friend to the race and the friend had asked if he could start the race. Unfortunately, while he was looking over the pistol he had been given, he happened to pull the trigger by accident and it just went off in his hand! The boys on the line decided this was their chance and off they went. There was no way of calling them all back for a proper start.
The BCCA Championships were the British Championships, they featured in the single British cycling magazine of the time Cycling Weekly. The BSCA also ran a championship event, but it garnered no external kudos or magazine coverage. Most of the youth riders from the BCCA event also rode in that one, too, which took place three weeks later. Importantly for me, the boy who took the third podium place earlier rode again. We spent the whole race within ten metres of each other; we both knew what this was about. With a lap to go, I thought I had cracked him, but for the whole of that last lap he kept chasing really hard and finished right behind me at the line. I shook his hand afterwards; it was one of the toughest cyclo-cross races I ever did. That was January 1999. Perhaps if I had been on the podium at the BCCA National Championships, which would have been reported, my ‘emergence’ later that year might not have come as the unacceptable shock it was to so many in authority.
Cycling in the UK now is nothing like it was then. At the time, the bungling, petty, political and indiscreet nature of the incompetence of so many, was personified in those two incidents. The original concept of a solution for Margam was a farce – jumping out of the van like a scene from a comedy show. Why not deal with the issue properly at the very first instance? It’s easiest in the long run.
Around this time, there were huge changes taking place in British sport generally. At the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, Great Britain won only one gold medal, in rowing, and finished below Algeria and Ethiopia in the medal table. The description ‘team of shame’, as one athlete described it on return, was a bit over the top, but the performance was a major embarrassment and probably the catalyst that helped create the magnificent success of the Beijing and London Olympics that followed.
The government decided to step in, to what until then had been very much an amateur affair in most sports. It gave teeth to a body formed in the wake of Atlanta called UK Sport, with a remit to oversee all the different sports’ governing bodies, both in terms of governance and in respect of elite performance. The National Lottery had started in 1994 and public funds were available for distribution. It was recognised that supporting emerging talent and sustaining elite talent was something the public wanted Lottery funds spent on. The images in the newspapers of British athletes coming out of the closing ceremony at Atlanta and auctioning their uniforms to the crowds were yet more embarrassment. The public did not want the country’s finest to have to exist as paupers in order to take on the rest of the world. It was obvious what happened when you did that: you won nothing. However, it was clear that if public money from the Lottery was going to be made available to the governing bodies, then most needed significant overhaul.
Senior competitive cycling in the UK was at this time run by three separate governing bodies, each with their own unrelated rule books and systems of governance. For younger categories, there were four bodies, with the BSCA having national and regional championships across all disciplines and age categories based on the school year.
UK Sport made it quite clear that going forward there could be only one organising body – British Cycling – and that future funding would depend on success; they were not going to throw money at a sport which didn’t come back with results, and in particular results were seen as Olympic medals. This created a dilemma for British Cycling. The great champions of cycling, such as those that I wanted to emulate, raced the Tour de France and the classics, which are for professional riders. The Olympics was traditionally for amateur riders. Therefore the Olympics historically catered for track riders, with a significant number of medals available there and, prior to 1996, just a single medal available to the road disciplines.
A very early decision in the formation of the British Cycling World Class Performance Programme (BC WCPP) was that it would be more focused towards delivering track cycling medals and, reflecting the sport’s imbalance of events, supporting the men far more than the women. The ‘Plan’ was born. The idea was to provide senior riders on the Plan with equipment, access to facilities and coaching but also a ‘salary’ or their own personal subsistence funding, which allowed them to become full-time cyclists. This was necessary in track cycling as there was no viable full-time scene on the world stage. The glory days of track cycling in the post-war era, when packed stadiums of paying fans created large prize pots, were long gone.
This change was to have a fundamental impact on the rest of my career. Even if I could find ways to fund myself through individual sponsorship, I could only compete for Great Britain if I was selected by British Cycling. The management team of the Plan managed the coaching education, structure, facilities and athletes. It also wrote the selection criteria, whether there was any logic or fairness in those criteria or not.
Quickly, with funding freely available, the support structure, coaches, mechanics, equipment programmes and of course the management of all of these elements, increased in size such that the public funds needed to run it became many times that granted to the individual athletes. This created a new reality that had not existed before. The management of this new support structure would find it almost impossible to countenance the selection of a rider not on the Plan over those it supported, coached and managed, who were on the Plan. Therefore the key to being selected for a GB team was to be on the Plan rather than performance in races. It didn’t fill anybody who understood what was happening with much confidence that many of those coaches and administrators who moved into the key positions on the Plan, as it started to evolve, seemed to be those who had been responsible for Great Britain’s chronic underperformance in the years leading up to Lottery funding coming on tap.
At the beginning of 1998, I was totally unaware of where all this would lead. My main concern was that my results had finally been recognised and that I had been given an Elite Cymru Lottery grant, which was a breakthrough. It covered only a small portion of what Mum and Dad spent supporting me. They and I were very grateful that the Lottery-playing public indulged me in this manner.
The summer of 1998 was busy. I went to Holland twice to ride at Helmond and then another ‘Tour’ for older riders at Achterveld. I was starting to get a nice little collection of T-shirts. There were the inaugural British Track Championships at Manchester, which had to be fitted in around the British Mountain Bike Championships at Builth Wells taking place at the same time. It was a lot of fun being part of Mick’s set-up and after gaining the series win, I wanted to win the British title. Mum and Craig set up on the campsite at Builth and Dad and I based ourselves at Manchester. Dad did the driving back and forth during the small hours of the night with me asleep in the back of the car.
The track championships were a joy to take part in. Aside from my own races, there were times when Dad and I could just sit in the stands and watch. People would come up to us and chat about the sport. If there was a women’s race on the track, Dad got the stopwatch out and made a video, just as he did of my races for later analysis.
Next up was our new summer holiday; we were going abroad to find the Alps. We based ourselves at a lakeside campsite in an Alpine valley in south-east France. When we arrived, there was evidence that the women’s Tour de France had passed through a few days before. We were frustrated to miss it, but there had been nothing about it in L’Équipe before we left. I’m not sure how many households in Wales took daily delivery of L’Équipe, but in the summer the paper boy delivered one to us. The reason we had selected this spot was that there were a number of major mountain climbs surrounding it, including the Col de la Bonette on which Robert Millar had made his amazing ride in the 1993 Tour. I wanted to ride the same climb to know what it was like.
Each morning Mum, Dad and I (Craig was at an air cadet’s camp) would tackle one of the peaks, each at our own pace. After reaching the top, we would pause to have a drink before the spectacular ride back down the mountains to our campsite and tent.
On the day of the Bonette, Dad and I didn’t actually intend to do that climb. Dad was suffering in the heat and wanted to do a climb before the heat of mid-day. We set off to tackle the Col de Vars together. About halfway up, we got to a road block which said it was closed due to roadworks, so we had to go somewhere else. Dad wasn’t entirely at his happiest, as the aborted half-climb up the Vars now placed us on the Bonette during the hottest part of the day.
Dad wanted to pace himself over the 26km of climb, and I soon left him doing his human snail impersonation. I was riding nicely at my own pace when some better competition than Dad turned up. A tanned, slim Frenchman, looking the genuine article, perfect bike and outfit, rode up from behind me and passed the 15-year-old girl with barely a sideways glance. At first, as I latched on behind him, he wasn’t concerned. The gradient changed a couple of times – steeper, shallower, all fine. I continued to follow, locked in behind him. A steep section came up and now he was determined to drop me. I wasn’t going to let that wheel get away! He tried on the hard bits and the less steep bits. He tried for the next 18km, right up to that last steep section on the Cime. By the time I got to the top, I had found a whole new spectrum of suffering in training, but here I was at 2,802m, on the highest road in Europe and the highest point ever taken by the Tour. I had ridden the same road that Robert Millar had, five years earlier, when he was alone at the head of the Tour.
There was no prize that day and no crowds cheering for me, but I had overcome a significant psychological test. I realised I could really push myself and ride well in the toughest of the high mountains. As I sat at the top, I knew the women’s Tour de France was still some years away for me, but I could go home to Wick even more convinced that I would win it one day.
Dad showed up at the top over 30 minutes later, pretending to be exhausted and with swollen eyes bulging out of his head, and puffing so much that people stared. It was so embarrassing when he sat near me. Our ride back to the campsite included another 1,300m climb en route, where again I kept on having to wait for Dad. I thought he was overdoing the ‘I’m too tired’ act when he later refused to walk down to the lake for a swim with Mum and me, saying his legs hurt.
I came back down to earth with a bump a few days after getting home. The British Criterium Championships were held on a closed road circuit at the end of August. I applied for dispensation to race with the seniors, which was granted by the BCF, and I lined up, aged 15, confident that based on my track performances a few weeks earlier, I should be in with a good chance. For the first lap, it all looked good as I blasted away from the start line. When I pulled off the front and took a quick look behind, gaps were opening up everywhere. Then it all went seriously wrong. I moved over, hoping to slot in behind the riders chasing me, but when they came past I could not stick with them and ended up riding by myself. I couldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding. Towards the end of the race, I was passed by the leader Sara Symington. Lapped! Looking back, it is easy to see what went wrong. We only had seven days in the Alps and were determined to do a major alpine climb or two, every single day. I had done more riding in that time than I had ever packed into a week before, and by some long margin. I was completely exhausted.