THE TOUR’S PIONEER

Nicole Cooke won the yellow jersey at the Grande Boucle, the women’s Tour de France, in 2006, culminating in a solo ride up Mont Ventoux, as Sophie Hurcom recalls

It didn’t matter that Nicole Cooke had never ridden up Mont Ventoux before stage 5 of the Grande Boucle Féminine Internationale, the women’s equivalent of the Tour de France, in 2006. She had only ever studied it on a map. She’d never even driven it in a car. Yet by the time the peloton reached the climb, featuring for the first time in the race’s history, Cooke was in the yellow jersey, having won the prologue and improved her lead over the next four days. Then she hit the foot of the climb, attacked, and accelerated further away. “I wanted to ride this one on my own, ahead of all my rivals, wearing the yellow jersey, just as I had seen in all the old magazines and books,” Cooke said in her autobiography, TheBreakaway.

As she emerged through the trees, under the scorching blue Provençal June skies, the barren, limestone mountainside opened out before her. She stretched her lead up Ventoux’s bends, switching back and forth towards the telecommunications mast at the top. By the finish line she’d secured the GC title.

Out on her own, ahead of everyone else, is a fitting analogy for how Nicole Cooke spent most of her career.

Long before Team Sky was formed, or the 2012 Tour and London Olympics made the country fall in love with cycling, Britain had Nicole Cooke. A rider who preceded British cycling’s golden era on the road, who became Britain’s first winner in the women’s Tour de France aged 23. Her palmarès is so long it includes almost every accolade on the women’s calendar: the Women’s World Cup, Giro Rosa, races such as the Tour of Flanders, Flèche Wallonne, Trofeo Binda, the World Championships, Olympics and Commonwealth Games. She was the first British cyclist to ever be ranked number 1 in the world by the UCI.

Yet Cooke is often perceived as an outlier. Culturally, she’s a very British cyclist - she emerged through the British Cycling set-up, winning two world titles as a junior, and back-toback gold medals as a senior, first in Beijing at the Olympics then at the Worlds in Varese, Italy, in 2008. But she’s not part of the establishment as riders such as Geraint Thomas or Mark Cavendish are. Compared to the conveyer belt of men’s talent out of BC into the pro peloton, there are far fewer women who have done the same, and the most successful, like Cooke or Emma Pooley or Lizzie Deignan, went their own way to do so. Cooke has spoken out about the lack of resources and support she was given at BC. In 2017, after retirement, she gave damning testimony to the Culture, Media and Sport select committee, calling out sexism and describing the organisation as “a sport run by men, for men”. She wasn’t afraid to call out the press for the lack of coverage she was given during her career, either.

A year later, Cooke returned to the Grande Boucle and successfully defended her title. While there are no excuses for the hardships and unfairness Cooke faced during her career, perhaps it makes her achievements even greater. She really did do so much of it all on her own.