Nicole Cooke

Nicole Denise Cooke, MBE (born 13 April 1983) is a Welsh former professional road bicycle racer and Commonwealth, Olympic and World road race champion.

At 16 she won her first senior national title, becoming the youngest rider to take the senior women's title at the 1999 British National Road Race Championships.

She won four UCI World Championship Junior titles, the road race in 2000 (Plouay, France), and the unique treble of mountain bike (Colorado, USA), time trial and road race (both Lisbon, Portugal) in 2001.

At 17 she became the youngest rider to win the senior women's title at the 2001 British National Cyclocross Championships.

Later that year Cooke won her second senior women's title at the 2001 British National Road Race Championships.

As a result of this achievement she was awarded the 2001 Bidlake Memorial Prize for outstanding performance or contribution to British cycling.

Cooke turned professional for the Spanish-Ukrainian Deia-Pragma-Colnago team at the start of the 2002 season, basing herself in Forli, Italy where she shared a house with Australian rider and future founder Rochelle Gilmore and learned Italian.

In her first professional season in 2002, Cooke won races in Italy, France and the Netherlands, and won the road race in the 2002 Commonwealth Games, the first ever win in the road discipline for Wales, either male or female.

Cooke said her strength left her in her first Tour de France, aged 19, and a meeting in the team campervan suggested "medicines" to help her.

She refused them.

The Deia-Pragma-Colnago team did not pay wages to Cooke and some colleagues.

The team took Cooke's racing bicycle ahead of the world road championships in October and then returned it in time for the World Championships following a telephone call from Ernesto Colnago.

Nicole was runner-up in the BBC Wales Sports Personality of the Year competition.

Cooke signed for the Acca Due O'Team for 2003 and a new UCI regulation limiting team sizes split the Acca Due O squad in two for 2003 so Cooke rode for the new Ausra Gruodis-Safi Team with many of the younger riders.

In 2003 Cooke won La Flèche Wallonne Féminine, the Amstel Gold Race, the GP de Plouay and the GP San Francisco.

She was the 2003 UCI Women's Road World Cup champion, youngest to win the competition and the first Briton.

She came third in the world road championship.

Cooke was voted BBC Wales Sports Personality of the Year.

She hit a stationary police motorbike in June at the Tour du Grand Montréal required stitches in her left knee.

Three weeks later she crashed again at the Giro de Trentino and had to miss 4 weeks of racing in July and August.

A winter and spring of rehabilitation failed to cure the recurring knee problem and she had surgery in May.

At the end of June in her first race in eight months, she won her fifth British title.

The following month Cooke won the Giro d'Italia Femminile, the youngest winner and the first British cyclist, male or female, to win a Grand Tour.

She rode for the merged and renamed Safi–Pasta Zara–Manhattan Team in 2004 and 2005.

At the 2004 Summer Olympics she placed fifth in the women's road race and 19th in the road time trial.

In 2005, she again won La Flèche Wallonne Féminine.

She also won the GP Wallonie, Trofeo Alfredo Binda and the Trofeo Citta di Rosignano.

She came second in the UCI Road World Championships.

At the end of 2005 she joined Swiss-based team Univega Pro-Cycling for two seasons, moving to Lugano in 2006 where she still lives.

In October 2005 the Welsh Cycling Union (WCU) selection commission decided to send a full team of six male riders to the 2006 Commonwealth Games, centered on supporting the aspirations of the National Coach Julian Winn, but also decided that Cooke would be sent as a one-person team to defend her title.

In December 2005, when preparing for the 2006 Commonwealth Games, she broke a collarbone during the Manchester leg of the UCI Track World Cup; despite this, and the lack of any team support, she came third in the road race at the Games in March 2006.

In her autobiography Cooke wrote "By their decision the WCU had gifted Australia, Canada, England and New Zealand my head on a plate".

None of the six Welsh men completed the men's race.

On 1 August 2006 Cooke took over as number 1 on the UCI's women's world road race rankings.

At Beijing in 2008 she became the first British woman to win a Gold Olympic medal in any cycling discipline.

Cooke announced her retirement from the sport on 14 January 2013 at the age of 29.

Cooke was born in Swansea, and grew up in Wick, Vale of Glamorgan.

She attended Brynteg Comprehensive School in Bridgend, where she gained the Rankin Prize, awarded each year for the highest academic achievement by a girl at GCE A Levels.

She began cycling at 11, starting at Cardiff Ajax Cycling Club of which she is a life member.

In April 2016 Cooke would cite this as an example of the sexist attitudes of the sport she encountered throughout her career in an article – Welcome to the world of elite cycling where sexism is by design.