Cycling: Remarkable year places Cooke on road to gold

The village of Wick, eight miles or so from Bridgend in South Wales, is an unremarkable place. The Welsh rugby hero Scott Gibbs used to live there, but he moved. Unremarkable, too, are the grey pebble-dashed houses overlooking Wick's recreation ground. But in one of them lives, with her mum, a secretary, and dad, a physics teacher, a young woman who is very remarkable indeed.

Nicole Cooke is 19. In her A-levels she scored straight As in Geography, Biology and Maths. But she has not joined her friends at the University of Cardiff, and even her schoolteachers accept that she has done the right thing in not furthering her formal education. For Cooke has become a professional cyclist with the Deia-Pragma-Colnago team based in Italy. She has a gift that has yielded four junior world titles and seems likely to deliver a Commonwealth Games medal next week, after which she will start to focus on her fiercest ambition, which is to win Olympic gold.

Since my knowledge of women's cycling is scant, I am obliged to turn to others to acquire some measure of Cooke's stature in the sport. One cycling enthusiast puts it neatly. To win three junior world titles in a year, he says, one of which was the mountain-biking championships in Vail, Colorado, even though she had not competed on a mountain bike for months and months, "is freaky, it's Forrest Gump stuff".

The national cycling coach in Wales, an Australian called Shane Sutton, is similarly extravagant in his praise. "It's everyone's dream to win one world title, but to win four in just over a year, you can't describe it," he says. "On the Continent, everyone wants to have their photographs taken with her, everyone wants her autograph."

Yet in Britain she is a household name only in the Vale of Glamorgan.

Indeed, I am reminded of the yachtswoman Ellen MacArthur, celebrated in France but virtually unknown in her native land until her exploits in the Vendée round-the-world race. One hopes that Cooke will get the same belated recognition before she ends up as the greatest female cyclist of all time, as Sutton thinks she might.

Cooke's manager, Mike Townley, is another who flails around for superlatives. With the late Tommy Simpson, the late Beryl Burton, and Chris Boardman, he says, Cooke is already "in the Parthenon of British cycling greats". Such is his excitement with his prodigy that I choose not to point out that he has made a right Acropolis of his classical references.

Still, Parthenon, pantheon, these Greek ruins are all much the same.

And the point remains. That Cooke is something very special. She has to be, if she is already drawing comparisons with Burton, who (although white and from Yorkshire) was the Tiger Woods, the Ronaldo, the Lennox Lewis, of British women's cycling.

Cooke doesn't especially look like a legend in the making. She is tall and long-limbed, with open, friendly features, bright blue eyes, a broad smile. She is engagingly self-possessed, with a firm handshake, and just a trace of the arrogance, or at any rate self-belief, that makes a champion.

She took up cycling, she says, because it was a passion of her dad's, indeed the family used to go on tandem holidays, her and her mum on one, her dad and her brother on the other. "We went cycling in Devon, the Isle of Wight, Norfolk, and we always got cycling magazines and followed the Tour de France. I joined a cycling club in Cardiff when I was 11."

Within a year she had won the British under-12s cyclo-cross championships. "That was back in December '94," she says, kindly guiding me into the dim mists of time. "I beat all the boys, and that's when I thought 'this is pretty good'." Were the boys annoyed at being beaten by a girl? She giggles. "Yeah, there were some cross boys, but as the years went on I think people realised it was not so much of an embarrassment to be beaten by me."

Too right. In October 2000 she won her first junior world title, the road race at Plouay in France. In 2001 she added three more, including, in September, that mountain-biking contest up and down the Colorado ski slopes.

"The start was straight uphill," she says, "so there was no argy-bargy through a little bottleneck like there is sometimes."

As one who has traditionally used his mountain-bike for nothing more exerting than a trip to the local Londis, I ask what skills are required over difficult terrain (although I doubt even she has my facility for negotiating the kerb and slipping seamlessly into heavy London traffic carrying a medium-sliced Sunblest).

"You really have to watch where you're going in terms of roots and rocks and jagged edges," she says (I don't want to dwell on this, but I still think that as life-endangering obstacles go, the W7 bus to Finsbury Park has the beating of any jagged edge).

"And it helps to be good at bunny-hopping, where if you get to a log or some steps, you just take off so that you land nicely on the other side. Your feet are clipped into pedals so it's a case of jumping up and bringing the bike with you, like the start of a wheelie."

How many bikes does she have? "Lots. Basically one for all the disciplines, track, road, time-trial, cyclo-cross, a mountain bike, a training bike. And a going-to-school bike, your average Halfords bike."

And the longest distance she has covered in a day? "About 125 miles," she says, casually. "This winter I did 125 miles in training, on two consecutive Sundays. And my aunt lives just outside Hereford. I've cycled there fairly often."

When the Commonwealth Games (in which she is contesting three events, the time trial a week today, the points race, and cycling's blue riband competition, the road race) are over, Cooke will embark on the women's Tour de France, which is scarcely less gruelling than the men's version.

"It's 14 days of racing with one day's rest," she says. "We start in Holland, then head into Belgium and France. Over three days at the start of the race there are three stages of 92 to 95 miles. Then we head south into the hills, to Courchevel, and then clockwise up towards the north-west of France. On the final day there's a time-trial in Paris." She grins. "It should be good."

The prize-money, though, is not much to write home to Wick about. Last year's winner bagged just £2,500. "It's about a tenth of what the men get," says Cooke. "In fact, more like a hundredth. But it's getting better. People are beginning to get wages they can live off, although the average rider would still get more working in Tesco's."

Not being remotely average, Cooke is doing quite nicely.

"There are three or four who make a good living," she adds. "Leontion van Moorsel [the Dutchwoman who won three gold medals at the Sydney Olympics] has a high profile in Holland. She is making enough money to live off when she retires."

That Cooke herself has a higher profile in the Netherlands, and other cycling-crazy countries, than she does here, seems not to bother her unduly. "That's just the way it is," she reasons. "And at least I'm based in Italy, where men's cycling gets nearly as much coverage as football, and women's cycling gets its fair share of coverage in the [daily sports newspaper] La Gazzetta dello Sport."

None the less, it remains an oddity that Cooke's victory in last weekend's British road-racing championships received more coverage in Italy than in Britain. It was her third such victory in four years. She was just 16 when she first won the national title, which reportedly put lots of noses out of joint in the higher echelons of the British Cycling Federation.

When she failed to win the following year, Cooke and her father, Tony, blamed a tactical conspiracy among the other riders, who were on the British team and unlike her were full-time products of the BCF's Lottery-funded world-class performance plan.

"Because I was still in school, and hadn't been nurtured with the others, and because they [the BCF] had spent a few million taking riders on training camps to Australia, they were so embarrassed when I first won that they said it was a fluke," says Cooke. It is a business that still rankles with both her and her folks, and doubtless with the BCF too, but Townley, her manager, later implores me not to make a big deal of it. So we let it drop.

Instead I turn to another controversial issue: drug-taking. It is known to be rife in men's cycling, but what about the women's game?

"Unfortunately yes," she says. "But I've come to the conclusion that I've got where I am without drugs. I've had four wins this year against seniors, so it's not as if I'm lacking, or as if they're so much better that I need to take anything. But there are a few riders in the peloton [cycling jargon, for those of you who haven't been watching the Tour de France, meaning the main, bunched group of riders] who look different. They have absolutely no fat, they're very, very muscly, abnormally muscly, and they have deeper voices. They're the ones who have been tested positive, and have been given bans... but through the winter, which is very convenient for them."

She smiles. I fancy that the cycling establishment will have to get used to Cooke sticking the odd twig in their spokes. As for her own femininity, there is nothing impairing it (although she does not have time for a boyfriend; "I haven't particularly been looking," she says) so what is it, exactly, that equips her to cycle so cleverly and so powerfully?

She shrugs. "I don't really know. I just have staying power for the longer hills and I can look after myself in a sprint finish."

Has she ever had time for other sports? "I was good at cross-country, and I played hockey for the school [Brynteg Comprehensive, which has an enviable record in turning out sporting greats; other former pupils include the 1964 Olympic long-jump champion Lyn Davies, and the Wales and Lions scrum-half Rob Howley].

"And I've a lot of interest in women's tennis, which to me seems more psychological than physical. It's very interesting to watch. And in that way it's like cycling. Because cycling is about the body, the brain and bike, except that nearly everyone is on a similar top-quality bike, and nearly everyone can prepare the body, but not everybody is concentrating, or focused. It comes down to the mind in the end."

Nicole Cooke: The life and times

Name: Nicole Cooke.

Born: 13 April 1983, Swansea.

Height: 5ft 4in (1.62m).

Weight: 8st 9lb (57kg).

Family: Denise (mum), Tony (Dad), Craig (brother).

Pet: Zulu ­ "my crazy cat".

Interests: Murder mystery novels and easy listening music.

How she started: Began racing in 1994 with Cardiff Ajax Cycling Club after going to Maindy track in Cardiff. From there she raced cyclo-cross and her first win came in the Welsh Under-12s cyclo-cross championship where she beat all the boys.

Career highlights: Won four world titles in 12 months (World Junior Road Race champion 2000, World Junior Road Race champion 2001, World Junior Time Trial champion 2001, World Junior Mountain Bike champion 2001). Won Sports Writers' Association International Newcomer of the Year award in 2001. British Elite Road Race champion 1999, British Elite Road Race champion 2001, British Elite Cyclo-Cross champion 2001.

She says: " I am exhausted, my legs are really hurting, but I am absolutely ecstatic." After winning the World Junior Time Trial title in October 2001.

They say: "She's calm, confident and smart, a far cry from the shallow teenagers of stereotype." Jon Steveson, Cycling News.

And other thing: Nicole was declared "too young" to ride in the 2000 Sydney Olympics, despite being the British Senior champion and having beaten all her Olympic rivals.