Quite often, I come across someone who hasn’t heard of Nicole Cooke. Perhaps her name is new to you too? There’s no shame in not having heard of her, because who would have told you?
Cooke is one of the greatest cyclists Britain has ever produced. She won the World Championships and the Olympic road race in 2008, becoming the first woman ever to do so. She was the first British rider to reach number one in the UCI rankings. She won Flèche Wallonne, the Amstel Gold race, and the Tour of Flanders, and permanently held the British road race jersey between 2001 and 2009.
She won the Giro d’Italia Femminile in 2004 and the Grande Boucle Féminine Internationale in 2006 and 2007. In case those races don’t sound completely familiar to you, that’s the Giro and the Tour, or what passed for them, in the dark ages of women’s pro cycling in the nineties and noughties. This may seem like a long time ago, but Cooke’s victories are still comfortably within living memory – she’s a year younger than me.
Yes, Britain had a grand tour winner before Chris Froome and Bradley Wiggins. A Welsh rider won the yellow jersey twelve years before Geraint Thomas brought it home in 2018.
And for some reason, no one thought to tell us.
I thought a lot about Nicole Cooke as I stood on Ventoux last week, waiting for Vollering, Reusser and Niewiadoma (in whatever permutation they might arrive). She raced up this same mountain in 2006, from Malaucène, wearing the yellow jersey, and although I was by that point thoroughly obsessed with cycling, I never found out about it.
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