I was away with the British team again. You cannot look at it with the perspective of the current well-oiled BC machine. Although Mandy Jones had won the senior Women’s World Road title in 1982, that was our last world road race medal. Year after year, GB had simply entered riders who mostly didn’t even finish let alone ride with any thought of victory. While I have had many issues with British Cycling over the years, I must admit that now we are light years ahead of where we were. Plouay, however, was possibly the all-time low.
Where to start? There was the GB coach who arrived without a map of the area. Unsurprisingly, the local shops had sold out when the World Championships came to call. The year before, Dad and I had bought three, so I had mine and a spare one. I did the decent thing and gave him one and then we went out on our bikes. At one stage, he insisted that we should go down a road that I was certain was only a farm drive. I refused and waited for his return. The look on his face was priceless.
On another occasion we were driving to the course in two of the brand new BC WCPP team cars. No expense spared, custom roof racks, interconnecting radios, colourful decals and all sorts of gadgets – some of which they knew how to use and others maybe not. We had already got lost once on the way to the course, so now we were in a bit of a hurry trying to make up time. Suddenly, there was the wail of an emergency vehicle siren. This, I kid you not, is what transpired:
Front vehicle to back vehicle: ‘You need to pull over and let him past.’
Back vehicle: ‘There is nothing behind us. It’s you, you have turned on the siren.’
Front vehicle: ‘No, it’s not me, it’s you. You must have turned it on.’
Back vehicle: ‘No it’s you, I’ve done nothing.’
Front vehicle: ‘Let’s pull over and see who it is.’
So the cars pull over and the drivers leap out. They inspect each other’s car and decide that one of them is making the noise. They decide it was the back vehicle.
Front vehicle: ‘There has to be a switch here somewhere – what were you fiddling with?
Back vehicle: ‘I wasn’t fiddling with anything – it just went off.’
It was like watching two naughty kids. After some time searching, without any luck, they then got on their knees and were looking underneath the dashboard. All the time, the wailing continued. Eventually, they rang British Cycling at Manchester to find out where the switch was. Peace at last. I was trying to win a world title and somehow I had stumbled on to the set of a Laurel and Hardy film! What next? Somebody showing up with a ladder and a pot of paint?
The day before the time-trial we set off in the cars at 9.30 when the sun was shining and all was briefly well with the world. After way too many detours and disappearing up blind alleys, we eventually got to the wrong point on the course at about 3pm – just when it was beginning to chuck down with rain, exactly as the weather forecast stated it would. We were racing the World Championship the next morning and here we were, soaking wet, freezing cold and hadn’t eaten since early in the morning, with yet another hour’s drive back to the hotel to contemplate our misery. Still we hadn’t seen the entire course. What a shambles. Dad had rung that morning and offered to pick both of us girls up and take us to and from the course to do the ride. ‘No thank you, Mr Cooke, we are more than capable of doing that.’
Mum and Dad had hired a cottage that was a short walk from the course. British Cycling were based 30 miles from the course and the staff clearly had only a hazy idea on how to get there. Weeks before, aware of the potential disasters, Dad had asked Peter King if I could stay with Mum and Dad. ‘Certainly not.’ Dad had then offered to move our family out of the cottage and give the booking completely free to the British team. ‘It’s a walk from the course, please take it.’ ‘No thank you, Mr Cooke, we are quite content the best arrangements are being made.’ I could go on and on.
The time-trial, not unexpectedly, was a complete mess. I was not rested or in anywhere near the right place mentally and I came tenth. Not that I was the only victim of their incompetence. At the start area, I had completed my warm-up and was making my way to the start ramp when I saw Claire Dixon already waiting, standing there shivering in the rain. She was scheduled to start 12 minutes after me, so what was she doing there? Apparently, Laurel and Hardy didn’t want her to miss the start, so they had cut her warm-up short, without any discussion, and made her stand in the freezing cold rain close to the start, while they went and got in the warm car. You couldn’t make it up.
I was fed up and angry after the time-trial. This should have been the year of my emergence on to the world cycling scene. Instead, all I had to show was a bronze in the mountain bike championships, nothing from the track and time-trial and I had been blocked from going to the Olympics. Mum likes her poetry and is a big fan of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’, particularly the second verse and the part that goes:
If you can dream and not make dreams your master
If you can think and not make thoughts your aim
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same.
I could never go along with that. I have never wanted to be consoled about a failure, I am just plain angry. I want to live with that anger, not to feel consoled about losing. To say that I was pumped up for the road race would be an understatement. If anyone else had ideas about winning, then they would have to deal with me first.
My race started at 9.15am and three full days before, I was advising that I would need an early breakfast. British Cycling had taken their own chef, especially for the event. Cyclists need to be eating about three hours before a road race, so digestion is complete. Even though I asked very nicely, apparently it was entirely impossible for the chef to do anything whatsoever until 7.30am, so I got up early and cooked my own breakfast and enjoyed every second of doing so. I hope the chef was snoring. This was my day, my show.
I got to the front quickly, knowing the danger of crashes early on in junior races. After about 3km the road narrowed and I heard the sound of a crash behind; unfortunately all my team-mates were caught up in it, so any tactics we may have had were now gone. I was now on my own against the other teams. But this wasn’t a race where I was going to let anyone else dictate the tactics. I was going to ride this race from the front. I attacked on a climb and established a break of four with Clare Hall-Patch of Canada, Russia’s Natalia Boyarskaya and Magdalena Sadlecka of Poland. Like me, none of my fellow breakaway companions had been in the medals in the time-trial, so we were all well motivated for the break to stay away. On the other hand, it meant that the bunch still contained good strong riders, the medallists from the time-trial including winner Juliette Vandekerckhove of France aiming to do the double in front of her home crowd.
We built up a lead of 30 seconds, so most of the time we were out of sight of the bunch in the winding hilly lanes, but the last long climb was on a straight wide road and every lap the bunch were able to see us and become incentivised to chase. It was clear that we had to continue working hard to maintain our slender lead, but as the laps went by it seemed more likely that we were going to be able to stay away and my thoughts started turning to how I might win.
Being four was good in that we could share the work, but it also meant that someone was going to miss out on a medal. I was confident that if it came down to a sprint finish, I had practised enough on the course with Craig and Dad. However, the grand way to win any race is alone. The question was when to attack. Too far from the finish, with more than one lap to go, and they would probably combine forces to bring me back and I would be weakened, so I opted for an attack on the last lap using a climb. I attacked but they all came back to me; however I was not too concerned as there was still the final long climb to come and my attack had provided me with some useful intelligence about the relative strengths of my breakaway companions.
All four of us were still riding well together, sharing the pace-making. There was always an extra effort to be made during your spell on the front, and then as you went to the back of the group you were able to recover in the slipstream of the other riders, ready for your next turn on the front. I wanted to shuffle our order, so that by the next time I attacked, I had set up a situation with Clare and Magdalena in line still recovering after their efforts and Natalia on the front. Natalia was showing some signs of tiring, she would be the least effective chasing and would momentarily block the other two. I got my rivals into the order I wanted, with a couple of discreet moves on corners.
Approaching the final climb, I started to feel the tension build as I waited for the right moment to attack. We were about a third of the way up when I made my move. I succeeded in dropping Natalia and Clare, but Magdalena was able to respond and clawed her way back to me. I still had a significant portion of the climb left. I attacked again towards the top, and this time gained the gap I needed to prevent Magdalena taking advantage of my slipstream.
I still had over 2km to the finish line. I rode like a demon, my style shot to pieces. I was just so desperate to get to that finishing line, my body bobbing up and down as I used every muscle I possessed to make that bike go as fast as it could. I let out a huge roar of triumph as I crossed the line. I had done it. I had finally won the right to wear a World champion’s jersey. I had fought the whole year through a system in which very few seemed to want to help me, and many more appeared to want to block me. I even managed a smile the next morning when the chef found himself cooking breakfast for the junior boys at 6.00am.
At the conclusion of Plouay, there was time for reflection. Together with Mum and Dad and a few other people, we constructed a 29-page report for British Cycling. I have printed it off again as I write this. There are pages of recommendations: lists of emergency contact numbers, travel plans, accommodation addresses, daily bulletin board, communication of travel arrangements, eating times, arranging that chefs are available to do early meals, etc. I look at that document now and see how complete it was and am proud of its professionalism. We sent it off to British Cycling.
Up until the early ’90s, even as late as Bradley Wiggins’s junior track campaign of 1998, little groups could be fairly self-contained within the BC structure, but Lottery funding had changed all that. In 2000, there was a large machine. It comprised lots of people, many of whom were competent – they weren’t all Laurel and Hardy figures – but from where I was looking there wasn’t enough high-quality talent to spread around.
Prior to Plouay, Dad stood accused by Peter King of not letting his staff get on with ‘looking after’ his daughter when away with the British team. Why couldn’t he just let go? Dad ripped into him. Had Peter actually looked closely at some of his staff? Had he watched the way some of them behaved? (At that time, we did not have Graeme Obree’s autobiography, where Graeme states that during a track World Cup in Milan, some members of the British cycling team urinated in his bed. But tales of these antics and worse were rife at the time. Professionals they were not.) Plouay provided more than enough evidence that change was needed in British Cycling. This was in contrast to other areas of cycling such as the BSCA, where my parents had been happy to let me go away between the ages of 12 and 16 to Holland, because they could trust the people I was going with.
In more philosophical moments, I tell myself I just happened to crash into the wrong people at the wrong time. It was only one gold medal, and a junior one at that, but nearly 20 years without any road race medals of any form was a very long time. At least some people at British Cycling were now paying attention. Peter King, the CEO, received the report and assured us that many lessons had been learnt and things would change.
And they did. They needed a new women’s endurance coach. Recognising that they had no one who was capable, they made their search global and recruited an experienced Canadian with a successful record, and, unique among BC coaching staff, she was female. Peg Hill was going to be different. By the time of the 2001 World Championships in Lisbon, most of the Laurel and Hardy support staff were out. British Cycling was moving towards being the professional organisation that it is today.
The World Road Championships are always a time for meeting people, and although it is a gathering of national teams, the managers of professional teams are always there to keep an eye out for potential riders from the U23 and junior races. Giancarlo Ghillioni, a Swiss, introduced himself as a representative of the Italian team Acca Due O. He’d been on the phone to the team president after watching the race and wanted to know if I’d be available to be a stagiaire (a temporary, unpaid position) with the team the next season.
Wow! Acca Due O was the No.1 women’s road team at the time. There was also a feeling of relief that I was finally talking to someone who knew what the sport was all about.
I was still only 17 and had my A-levels to complete the next summer, which meant I couldn’t join the team for another year. Education came first, but in the meantime Giancarlo said it was important to learn Italian, or at least make a start. When I returned to Brynteg, I approached my French teacher, Mrs Walsh, asking if there was someone who could help. She suggested Mrs Hodges, who taught German but was Italian, from Bolzano. She was excited by the idea and recommended some Teach Yourself books from which I could start learning, and then she took me for revision one lunchtime a week. The decision to do some of my exams early had paid dividends, because now I could take this extra study burden without worrying about time at school. My future beckoned and 2001 promised to be an exciting year on all fronts.