As the days went by and with the two UCI teams I had contacted producing no viable offer, it looked like the British WCPP women’s road team could be the best option. They did plan to go to a number of European events and maybe I could still ride the races I dreamed about. It was going to mean eating humble pie, after I had told them that I was going to join a professional team.
I could see that on the positive side I would be with my GB team-mates and that regularly racing together would help us build up our tactical knowledge and become a more effective team ready for the World Championships or Olympics. British Cycling’s appointment of Peg Hill gave me confidence. The WCPP had enough funding to send riders to races with a full accompanying staff of mechanics and physiotherapists. By comparison, the continental women’s teams were often under-funded, and travelling to races meant hours sitting in the car, rather than flying, and most of the time you had to look after yourself.
On the negative side I wouldn’t be able to learn from riding alongside an older, more experienced rider who had won a classic or road World Championship. This was the vital ingredient necessary for the next stage of my development. The squad was also seriously weakened. Yvonne McGregor had retired at a natural point in her career, but surprisingly so had Ceris Gilfillan, who was only three years older than me.
I approached British Cycling and had a meeting in December with Peter Keen and Dave Mellor who was in charge of the women’s road section. Peter and Dave were both supportive of the idea of me joining the team and we made plans for the 2002 season. At the meeting, I was shocked and disappointed to learn that Peg Hill was no longer the coach.
We then spoke about the Team Agreement. This was the same document that had been used when I was riding as a junior, when I had insisted on a couple of changes. I had brought a copy to the meeting and we discussed it and made notes on it. Peter and Dave were positive about the proposed changes but they would have to seek authorisation before final approval. That same day, I received a welcoming email from Richard Wooles, the coach hired to replace Peg Hill on the women’s squad. My only knowledge of Richard was that he was a competent club rider and a GB soigneur at Plouay. I amended the Team Agreement in line with what we had discussed and agreed, and emailed it back to them. At last, I thought, I could just concentrate on my training. I was looking forward to riding with my British colleagues and hoping we could form a productive team together in 2002.
Dave Mellor replied to my email, saying that the proposed changes were not acceptable to those in authority above him and that I would have to sign the standard Team Agreement. The standard Agreement included a clause stating that the rider had to ‘obey every instruction of the coach’. The problem for me was that I would have no control over choosing the coach, and they seemed to be changing coaching staff at quite some rate, with Richard Wooles the third coach in less than 12 months. Why should I be forced to take instructions from someone who didn’t know me and I didn’t know? The attitude of some of the staff was far from professional. Meanwhile, the performance of the senior women’s team at the 2001 Lisbon World Championship was woeful: 15th, 53rd and one DNF in the road race, and not a single rider competed in the time-trial. What had the WCPP done with Ceris, the rider with ‘such a bright future’ in 2000? Why should I sign an Agreement to obey all instructions from an organisation that had been pouring Lottery money into the best funded women’s programme on the planet and achieved so little? More disturbingly, what had happened to Peg?
In one sense, even though I was only disagreeing about words on a document, I was very aware of the case of Wendy Everson, a track cyclist. She was on the WCPP and objected to some of the things she was asked to do and the way she was being treated, particularly compared with the men. Unable to change the situation through discussion, she decided to take her case to an employment tribunal. BC defended themselves at the tribunal, not by justifying their actions but by simply stating that Wendy was not employed by them; she was actually self-employed, as a grant-funded athlete, therefore the tribunal had no jurisdiction. The tribunal agreed with this argument on the basis that since neither BC nor Wendy were paying employer or employee taxes, the relationship was not that of employer and employee. No doubt if BC were a private company and had demanded the degree of control over individuals that the Team Agreement sought, the Inland Revenue would have been interested in addressing the relationship at the heart of the case, but since BC was a publicly funded body they had no interest in following up. It did not stop the relationship imposed by the Team Agreement being one-sided.
The changes to the Agreement we had discussed in Manchester were in line with the revised Agreement that I had signed for the previous two years. If they had agreed once, maybe if we could move the case high enough in the organisation we could persuade them to agree to some ‘reasonable’ changes. So I asked Dad to write to the CEO Peter King and to the president Brian Cookson. The reply was emphatic. I would not be eligible to train or race with the WCPP, or Great Britain, unless I signed the standard Agreement. No changes were allowed.
At this point, it is worth considering that the grant money was irrelevant when compared with what was really at stake: the whole relationship between the athlete and the governing body of their sport. No one was going to any World or Olympic Games without selection by, and support of, their governing body. If I, or anyone else, was going to be able to perform, it was vital that such support was effective, or at worst neutral. I’d already had my experience of negative support in 2000, at each of the events I had ridden with the national team. After my recommendations in late 2000, the organisation had gone out on a global search to obtain a top-notch women’s coach. They had recruited Peg Hill from Canada. She was there during the spring and summer of 2001. I met her at the British Championships in Oakley, and the last time in Lisbon 2001.
Peg Hill wrote about Lisbon 2001 and of the squad she was working with:
Most of the women didn’t belong at that level yet. It was a delight to work with Nicole who obviously did know what she was doing, wasn’t afraid to say what she needed from the support staff, and got the racing results. I thought it was a breath of fresh air but other staff seemed to grind their teeth about it. I always say that had she been American, her forthrightness would have been viewed as being normal for an elite athlete.
The next time I encountered Nicole was at the 2001 World Championships in Lisbon. She had already won the Mountain Bike Cross-Country World title. Again I saw a happy athlete.
Before the road race, the staff asked her what she would like for breakfast. Nicole answered with no hesitation. Staff seemed to grit their teeth when dealing with her. I found it entirely refreshing – an athlete who knew what she needed and produced results!
I found her very easy to work with. Since I co-authored a book on Sport Psychology for Cyclists, I offered sport psych sessions which seemed to be tolerated by the Endurance Squad. Nicole embraced it and we had a one-on-one relaxation and visualisation time the day before she won the road title. I would have liked to continue to work with Nicole, but I know now that I was in the wrong camp, and my time with the WCPP was abruptly ended, even contravening the conditions of their contract.
Now in December Peg had been dismissed, and instead a novice male coach, with no experience of riding on the continent, no experience as a professional and no experience of the female scene or coaching female riders, had been put in place. I’d already had too many bad experiences of poor advice.
What could I do if I wanted to question a decision? BC did have its own appeals procedure but before appeal, any appellant had to offer up to BC a deposit to cover the assembly and maintenance costs of conducting the appeal. In the event of the appellant not being successful, all costs, without limit, were to be met by the failed appellant. In the regulations, the BC Board not only had given themselves the unique authority to decide who was on the panel, with no right to dispute that construction, they also required that the panel need not make public their decision but that the decision of the panel had to be delivered to the Board. The Board had to approve any decision of the panel in order to validate it and the Board reserved the right to dismiss such findings the panel may make. That is why Wendy Everson had approached an external body with her grievance, hoping for a fair hearing of her case. Fundamentally, I felt as if this was a collection of insecure men who wanted a sport for men. Peg was the only female coach, and undoubtedly she suffered from the same prejudice as Wendy and me. The ridiculous wording of the Team Agreement – that you had to obey every instruction of whosoever the WCPP decided might be available to ‘coach’ you – reflected this.
I felt that BC took advantage of the fact that I was without a professional team for 2002 and exploited it, pushing the boundaries back from what Peter Keen and I had agreed previously. As I was getting nowhere with BC, maybe there was another way. UK Sport was the body charged by legal covenant with overseeing the individual sports’ federations, and the distribution of Lottery funds to individual athletes. Surely they could help? They could consider the Team Agreement and pass judgement to determine if what I was asking was ‘reasonable’ or not. Initial approaches to them fell on deaf ears. They said it was not their responsibility, but we reminded them that the responsibility lay with them and not BC. It was going to be a long haul.
Why didn’t I simply sign the Team Agreement and then try to work out a sensible arrangement with whoever was my coach or manager at an event? Aside from my own bad experiences in 2000, I had also seen other riders suffer as a consequence of the ‘Do as we tell you’ approach. Keiran Page was the same age as me and the male ‘talent’ of his age group. While I stood apart from WCPP, Keiran fully embraced it. After Lisbon, Dad asked Shane Sutton about Keiran. He had come 12th in the 2000 World Junior Time-Trial, and we all hoped he would get among the medals in 2001. Cruelly, the winner in 2001 was the rider one place behind Keiran the year before. ‘The trouble with Keiran is, he just does not know how to prepare for a big race. He does not even know how to do a warm-up,’ stated Shane Sutton.
Dad then told him that some years before, at a BSCA championship event, Keiran was warming up on a static turbo trainer and his dad Russell had a clipboard with a list of timings and heart-rate levels, in the most detailed and controlled of warm-up routines. Dad told Shane that when we saw this, we upgraded my own routine to match that of Keiran’s. If, years later, Keiran’s warm-up was inept, it was surely nothing to do with Kerian but everything to do with the sloppy and unprofessional techniques of the BC WCPP staff telling the riders what they had to do and, if ever questioned, pointing at a Team Agreement and saying, ‘Our way or the highway.’
The focus was wrong. When they made the rider the centre of what they were doing, then they would have success. Two years earlier, when Dad and I had prepared a report on proposed changes required for the sport to succeed, this had been a fundamental element – that the athlete and athletic performance should be the focus for the support staff, not the other way around. The Team Agreement formalised the ascendancy of the coach, and in my case, a novice coach, who, however nice he might be, knew precious little about women’s road racing at this stage of his career.
We reached an impasse. The best female road racer in Britain was not to be supported by Lottery funds. However, the BC team management and support staff would spend their year travelling around the world going to races where the riders would finish totally out of contention or even not finish at all. If they didn’t want to have a rider with ambition to win, then I didn’t want them. I didn’t sign the Team Agreement.
At least somebody, somewhere, thought something of me. UK Sport might not have wanted to convince BC that I should be on the WCPP, but at least they passed on an invite for me to attend a Garden Party at Buckingham Palace.
I needed to find a way to race. I went back to the UCI database and searched for teams that might be suitable. Three stood out as possibilities. I wrote introductory faxes and fired them off that night. The next morning I took the phone numbers of the teams with me on a five-hour training ride to Monmouth and called when I arrived to check that had they received the faxes. The first team said yes and they would get back to me, but Maurizio Ricci, who answered at the Deia-Pragma-Colnago team, was talking so excitedly that it made a huge impression. They were very keen for me to join the squad.
An offer was faxed through that evening – €8,000 for the season – which was a lot better than the €2,200 being offered by the Nürnberger and Farm Frites teams but a long way from the €15,000 I had been expecting from Acca Due O. At least I would be able to afford to fly out and back a couple of times during the year. Faxes went back and forth over the next few days and although they weren’t going to improve the money, the team manager would consent to me wearing my own shoes, glasses and helmet from which I knew I could negotiate another £1,000 in personal sponsorship elsewhere. No one could say professional women riders got into the sport for the money, but at least I could exist if I received no subsistence Lottery grant from UK Sport.
I was excited and thrilled that everything was back on track and I would be racing in Italy with one of the top teams after all. The reason I had picked Deia as a potential team was the presence of Spanish rider Joane Somarriba who had won the last two editions of the women’s Tour de France as well as winning the Giro d’Italia twice. It meant we would be doing the top-level races and I would have a fantastic champion to learn from; it would be an honour to ride with her and see someone like this in action from the inside of her team.
Although I didn’t know all the riders, it was clear that a team capable of winning the Tour de France had riders with different specialities: climbers, sprinters and breakaway specialists. To serve those riders, the rest of the team are composed of domestiques. Their role was described beautifully by writer, journalist and cycling enthusiast/historian Roger St Pierre, who wrote:
It is team tactics that so often win or lose races – and the lieutenants and the dog soldiers who expend their energy blocking chasing moves when they have riders up the road in a position to win. It is they who ride out into the wind so their aces can get an easier ride tucked inside their wheel [close to the rider in front and in his shelter]. Rare indeed is the major victory that cannot be credited in large part to the groundwork laid by the ‘domestiques’.
This would be my role in the first season. I knew that, as a young rider, I was an unknown quantity and would have to earn the respect of my team-mates before asking the team to ride for me and sacrifice their own chances. It was a bit much to expect me to have the stamina for the grand tours, but I knew I could be there helping in the one-day races. Then, if the opportunity came up in some of the lesser races, perhaps I would have a chance to race for the win myself. In the days after signing the contract, I was already riding imaginary races during my training rides.
I couldn’t wait. In mid-February I said goodbye to Craig, Mum and Dad to start my first professional season. Peter King had recently written to me on behalf of the BC Board confirming that until I signed the 2002 Team Agreement, without any of the amendments that were possible in 2001, I would not be riding for GB and ‘The Board does not accede to your request that the matter be put before the Sports Disputes Resolution Panel.’ I left Dad and Mike Townley, a solicitor who had experience of the sport, to bring the reluctant British Cycling Board and UK Sport to face their responsibilities. I was going racing.
I walked through the baggage hall at Bologna airport expecting to have to search for Maurizio Ricci. I didn’t have a clue what he looked like. A middle-aged man in a bright multi-coloured fleece rushed forward shouting out my name. He bubbled with generous enthusiasm throughout the journey to Forli. I was the second to arrive at the team house; French rider Fany Lecourtois had arrived a few days before and greeted me warmly when Maurizio dropped me at the door and said goodbye.
Fany was ten years older than me and had been around the tour since the mid-’90s. She was very nice and wanted to know all about me. A lifelong friendship was born that night as we chatted away, mostly in Italian but occasionally in French, laughing together at my funny accent and unusual word combinations. The team house had three bedrooms, two decked out with bunk beds sleeping six riders in a room, and we took a tiny room with two beds crammed in. The house was full of trophies, just like the houses of Acca Due O, but here they also had a cabinet full of videos. It was a treasure trove for me as my experience of elite racing had been limited to highlights of the men’s Tour de France, the most recent World Championships and standing by the side of a mountain road on holiday, watching the women’s Tour de France.
The videos went back to the early ’90s, covering most of the major women’s races, and I was able to take a walk back in recent history watching Fabiana Luperini win the Giro d’Italia four times in a row, along with Alessandra Cappellotto winning the 1997 world title. It was fantastic, but at the same time it brought home the fact of how far removed I had been from the centre of the cycling world. I thought I was quite well informed on riders’ statistics and race results, but this gave me quite a sharp reminder that I still had a lot to learn.
Every day seemed to be full of action and discovery, whether it was receiving my new team clothing, or heading out on training rides and seeing so many other cyclists. I would attack every hill on the ride as if it was the critical moment in a race, while Fany would ride the climb at her pace, meeting me at the top before we descended together into a new valley.
After returning from a training ride one day, team manager Luigi Milioni came round and told me I was going to Milan to meet the major sponsor. Ernesto Colnago, the legendary bike manufacturer had decided, seemingly on a whim, that he wanted to build me a custom frame. It seemed someone else thought something of me as well.
Joane Somarriba and my Spanish team-mates settled in the team’s second house while my Ukrainian team-mates and the riders of a second team, Raschiani, made up of mostly Italian riders, moved in with Fany and me. The rules state that there should only be one team managed by the same people but, I was quickly learning, many slid around rules when they wanted to. I initially assumed that the reason for having a second team was simply to gain extra exposure for sponsors, but, as I would soon learn, motives are usually more basic.
Until this point everything had been going perfectly. I’d been welcomed into the team, accepted by senior riders like Joane who was friendly, if slightly scary simply because of her achievements, and I was healthy, strong and in good form, raring to do my first race. The GP Castenaso was held on a flat course. The Spaniards were targetting the Tour de France later in the season and we didn’t have a top-class sprinter suited to the expected bunch sprint finish. Directeur sportif Giorgio Zauli told us that it was just a case of getting in the mix. For me, a valuable learning experience beckoned.
Then, less than 20 minutes before the race, Luigi told me I was to go back to signing on, re-sign and collect a new number. Somewhere, in Italian, there was mention of the GB team. Apparently, I was still to ride in my Deia-Pragma-Colnago kit. Why should I want to change kit? As confused as I was, it was also too late to question so I just accepted what I was told, and went and re-signed on and put on the new number I was given. I tried not to focus on any of this, as I prepared myself for my first-ever race as a senior professional. One of the British team riders came up to me before the start and said, ‘Thank you Nicole, for helping us out. You really got us out of a mess.’ For weeks I had been conversing solely in Italian or French and much of what was said passed me by, yet here was a girl talking to me in English and I had no idea what she was on about. The race was about to start – my first race for my team.
The pace was fast and the roads very narrow, but I felt good near the front of the peloton. I found Joane and asked if I could make an attack, she nodded back in her calm manner and I went into ‘attacking mode’, waiting for a move that I could counter, or an opening for me to launch my first attack. As a few breakaway riders were swallowed up into the bunch, I jumped hard down the left-hand side and sprinted for the next corner, leaning in low round the bend before sprinting off again. Two riders joined me and we had a gap on the bunch. I was loving the freedom of escaping the bunch and leading the race. One rider was from Acca Due O and was obviously marking the break, aiming to set up a sprint finish for their leader Diana Ziliute. We were eventually caught a few kilometres later and I spent the rest of the race watching the attacks and choosing counter attacks to follow. I made a couple more attacks of my own, more for the sheer thrill of it and to get a feel of the timing, rather than a calculated bid for victory.
With 10km to go, I got into position near the Acca Due O train at the front with the intention of going for the sprint finish. My team-mates were all staying safely in the middle of the pack and I would have to look after myself, sliding through gaps and trying to get as much shelter as possible from the teams setting up their sprinters. I sprinted to finish seventh behind Diana Ziliute. I was absolutely thrilled with my top ten result, in my first professional contest. After the race, I was buzzing with excitement and adrenaline. My team-mates were also excited for me and Giorgio said a top ten place was a great start and that I had done really well.
I chatted non-stop with Fany and Giorgio all the way back to Forli about the racing, That evening, after sitting down to a meal we all helped prepare, I rang home, excitedly recounting the lead-up and the race in great detail. Mum and Dad shared my excitement and let me finish and then Dad went back to the situation before the race. He wanted to know more about this strange incident with the GB girl and the number change. Had I ridden for Deia-Pragma-Colnago or for Great Britain? I would have been given a number in the series for my trade team. Any other number would have been for another team. What exactly had gone on? Dad told me to confirm a few details with my manager, right there and then.
I rang the manager and then got back to Dad. Apparently, the organiser had approached my team manager before the start. The UCI rules for a Category 1 race stated that only teams could compete and teams must attend with a minimum of six riders and a maximum of eight. We were there with eight but incredibly the British team had flown in especially for this one race, with a team of just five riders but with the full support crew. They could not start. The organiser asked the British manager, Dave Mellor, if there were any other British nationals riding who could be asked if they would change their entry. I was the only other British rider out of the 140 entrants. The organiser said Dave Mellor should ask me, but he knew that BC management had instructed I was never going to ride for Great Britain unless I signed their Team Agreement document. He persuaded the organiser to ask my manager if I would ride for Great Britain on this occasion, and that ‘request’ became an ‘instruction’ that I had to get a new number.
You couldn’t make it up. Laurel and Hardy were alive and well. So that is why I was thanked for helping them. If I had not signed on for Great Britain, they would have joined the spectators. Well, I didn’t mind because now I had ridden for Great Britain and not signed a Team Agreement. The evidence of this farce empowered Mike Townley and Dad in the work they were doing behind the scenes. They had recently got UK Sport to agree that they and not BC were responsible for the distribution of Lottery funds to athletes. This was a crucial legal point to make, as it placed the BC in the position not as gatekeepers but as administrators and service providers, responsible to UK Sport. Regardless that the BC Board had unanimously voted that they were not going to allow the beloved Team Agreement to go anywhere near the Sports Disputes Resolution Panel (SDRP) organisation, UK Sport had agreed that they, BC and I would go before the SDRP. To provide a fig leaf, the details were that it would not be in front of a panel but the SDRP would hire a QC to receive written statements, then convene a meeting to hear the various arguments and then an agreement would be thrashed out. That was one great victory for Mike and Dad. They were setting principles for UK Sport across all sports.
My first race had vindicated my recent decisions: I was with some great riders; I had achieved a top ten result and now had the confidence of all my very experienced team-mates and team management. Furthermore, BC had confirmed that, for all their best intentions, they still had not got their head around the finer details of bike racing, like turning up with the right number of riders in a team to be able to be allowed to start. Morally, their dogmatic stance regarding a Team Agreement was sunk, because as soon as I was essential to them, they let me ride for them without signing it. And, on top of all that, the British team manager did not have the good grace either to ask me before or to thank me afterwards for saving them from wasting a lot of the public’s money on flights for staff and equipment from Majorca, where they were holding their second warm-weather training camp. I was ignored.
Mike urged a word of caution, as a good lawyer would, and asked that my manager get photocopies of the signing-on sheet and a letter from the organiser confirming it all in writing. When it was reported at Manchester that we had the authenticated copies of the signing-on sheet showing my name against the Great Britain roster and the written statement from the organiser, the BC senior management reluctantly had to face the facts of the situation. Dad wrote a detailed email to Peter King, who replied declining to respond. Dad then wrote to UK Sport highlighting the hypocrisy and bungling. My first race had been very successful in so many ways.
A week later, we drove three hours to the Trofeo Citta di Rosignano on the coastline of Tuscany. I was excited and nervous because Giorgio told me that I would be the protected rider in the race, but stated it would be wasted if my enthusiasm could not be tempered. I was part of a team, he said, something I was not used to in my junior career when I was racing alone. He knew the hilly 107km course well and insisted that I should sit in behind my more senior team-mates for the first 90km before considering any move. Let them get you in the winning position.
I savoured the experience of being sheltered by my team-mates, including Joane, and sucked along in their slipstream as they controlled the race. A few kilometres from the start of the last hill some riders attacked. I went with them. A group of about 12 formed, including Fany. I shouted at her to work, but she didn’t need to be told, she was already on the front driving the break to get it away from the field, while I stayed in the slipstream, saving my energy. She was setting it up for me. As soon as we turned on to the climb, I took off, sprinting up the hill, finally able to unleash all my energy. As I crested the hill, four riders had come back to me, including Edita Pucinskaite, World Road Race champion in 1999, and silver medallist the previous year in Lisbon. We were all committed to working together, like a team pursuit, to try to hold off the bunch who would be chasing us down on the descent towards the finish. Suddenly, the lead motorbike crashed in front of us. In a split second, we had to dodge the motorbike, desperately changing our racing line in a zone where there were speed humps that we needed to bunny hop. We all made it past the motorbike and were back descending at top speed.
The plan was working perfectly. I didn’t feel any nervousness; I was already weighing up the strengths of my rivals and running through the various finishing scenarios in my head. I knew there was a right-hand corner with about 400m to go. If I positioned myself at the back, prior to this, it meant I could jump early, hopefully taking the others by surprise. There was a risk that if I went too early they could catch me if I died, but I preferred this plan rather than leading out the sprint. I carried as much speed as possible through the corner and then kicked with everything I could muster. I screamed with delight as I crossed the line two bike lengths ahead for my first professional victory. The bunch came in seconds later. I celebrated with my team-mates and Giorgio, not knowing who was most excited, me or the others, as we crowded around hugging and laughing. It had been a race plan that we had executed perfectly. Mum and Dad were almost speechless when I rang. It confirmed our hopes that I could be competitive very quickly in the elite ranks, but I don’t think any of us thought I would win in only my second race, while still aged 18. It looked like I didn’t need those 2003 university applications after all. For the foreseeable future, I would be cycling.