Racing Hard

by William Fotheringham

  Shortly afterwards, however, he signed a professional contract for the next two years with La Française des Jeux, the team sponsored by the French national lottery and managed by the former top French rider Marc Madiot. He is likely to be based in western France, near Nantes, or will move to Biarritz to join David Millar and Rob Hayles. [At this point, Hayles was a team mate of Millar’s at Cofidis.]

  “To ride with a top professional team is what I always wanted,” the 21-year-old said. “The Madiot brothers who manage the team believe in my ability and I am very happy. Having a professional contract has certainly helped my morale. They are talking about putting me in the one-day classics and perhaps the Tour de France.”

  Wiggins had signed a contract with the Linda McCartney Racing team for this season, only to see the team fold in January before he had turned a pedal in anger. But after that setback he won two important second-ranking stage races this spring while riding with the Great Britain track squad.

  In yesterday morning’s qualifying round on the bumpy wooden track in the vast Sportpaleis, which dates from 1933, Wiggins was clearly hampered by the injury, which occurred two weeks ago when he was brought off his bike by a tarpaulin which blew off a skip.

  Britain’s Olympic one-kilometre time-trial champion Jason Queally is taking a sabbatical from the distance this year to concentrate on his world speed record attempt next week. Not surprisingly the Scot Chris Hoy found him a hard act to follow and finished only eighth behind the Frenchman Arnaud Tournant, who won his fourth consecutive world title.

  Wiggins’s injury was one of a series of freak accidents which hit the British team pursuit quartet that year; the last paragraph makes amusing reading given that Hoy would go on to win Olympic gold in the kilometre in 2004.

  Cooke ready to take on the world

  12 October 2001

  No Briton has ever started a world road race championship as the overwhelming favourite but that is the status Nicole Cooke will enjoy in Monsanto Park this morning when she defends the women’s junior title she won last year in Brittany.

  “Enjoy” is perhaps not the most appropriate word: Cooke will be a heavily marked woman. The rest of the 64-rider field know full well that her back wheel is the best one to follow, and that if they can stay in her slipstream to the finish they may stand a chance of winning the gold medal.

  Surprise is a key weapon in a road race but it is no longer part of Cooke’s armoury. Since she sprinted across the line in Plouay in October with a yell of delight to become Britain’s first ever junior road race champion, male or female, she has added the mountain-bike title and, on Tuesday, the time-trial gold.

  She has no team-mates to help her, so her main ally today is the course, with its two hills. “I’m definitely going to be marked, but this course is hard enough for the race to split up; hopefully it will, and a small group will be easier to deal with. Last year I won from a break, but the bunch could have pulled us back perhaps, but this course is so hard that a selection will be made of the best riders.”

  Her triple of medals across the three disciplines in the space of 12 months is already unprecedented, and today she is chasing another record: no junior man or woman has successfully defended a world road race title, simply because the titles usually go to a second-year junior and the following year he or she will be racing at senior level.

  In the seven years since she began cycling, however, Cooke has acquired a taste for records because there is little satisfaction for her in beating junior opposition, according to her mentor, the former professional Shane Sutton, who is the Welsh national cycling coach.

  Sutton was renowned for his hardness, but even he has been astounded at Cooke’s competitive mentality. “She likes to kill off the opposition; that’s the way she’s always been. It doesn’t matter who it is, who she is up against, her tenacity is unbelievable.”

  Born into a cycling family, coached by her father Tony, Cooke has dispensation to race against the men and is no shrinking violet: last year, in a local race in the Welsh town of Penarth, Julian Winn, a seasoned British international, watched in astonishment as she attacked for an early lap prize. “He couldn’t believe what was going on,” chuckles Sutton. “I told him it was just Nicole putting the boot in.”

  If Sutton admires Cooke’s coolness under the pressure of a big occasion, he is astonished by her versatility. When she won her mountain-bike title in Vail in September, Cooke had not raced on a mountain bike for a year, since she won the bronze in the event the previous year. She finished seventh in the senior women’s world cyclo-cross championship in February.

  An articulate 18-year-old who has just passed A-levels in maths, geography and biology, Cooke would have been selected for Sydney last year, had she not fallen foul of a rule that keeps junior cyclists out of the games.

  An Olympic gold is her big aim within cycling, but this is not a goal acquired recently: interviewed at the age of 12, she said that gold in Athens was her goal.

  Whatever the outcome today, Cooke now has to choose a course for the next few years. Two professional teams are chasing her signature on a contract, including the Italians of Acca Due O, the leading women’s team in the world, and she will also have the chance of a place in the British World Class Performance squad. In addition the Welsh see her as a potential Commonwealth Games women’s champion in Manchester next year.

  Sutton is a down-to-earth Australian, not given to hyperbole, but he is effusive. “I’m sure if she goes into the right system she can be Olympic champion in Athens. She obviously has the ability, but she needs the right pathway from here on in.” In fact he goes further, far further: “She can be the best women’s road racer of all time.”

  Cooke would, of course, go on to win that junior road race and would eventually take a unique double in 2008: Olympic and world road race gold medals. She was to be a fixture in the British team for the next 10 years and would inspire a generation of British women racers before retiring early in 2013. Like Queally, she was a hugely influential figure. Sutton was in the infancy of his coaching career at this stage, working within the Wales set-up with a view to the Manchester Commonwealth Games of 2002.

  Riding the killer whale on wheels

  6 September 2001

  When Jason Queally sat for the first time in the Blueyonder Challenger at its unveiling in London yesterday he suddenly became aware of something which had not crossed his mind: in the quest for the world human powered land speed record it does not pay to be claustrophobic.

  “It’s like being in a racing car or a space pod,” was the Olympic one-kilometre time-trial gold medallist’s first impression of the £100,000 machine. “One of the great things on a normal bike is that you can see the whole world going past but with this one you’re limited to what you can see out of the canopy.”

  Six months in the making, the Challenger vehicle bears as little resemblance to the “normal” bike on which Queally won his Olympic gold medal in Sydney last year as Michael Schumacher’s Ferrari does to a Fiat Uno.

  The formula one influence is key: the machine is born of a partnership between the bike designer Chris Field, who produced Queally’s Olympic bike, and the motorsport constructors Reynard.

  The front wheel, gears and pedals might not be out of place on Lance Armstrong’s Tour de France machine but that is as far as it goes. The aerodynamic, computer-generated body, made of a space-age honeycomb of carbon fibre and kevlar looks part squashed Jaguar E-type, part torpedo.

  Remove the body and the chassis bears an uncanny resemblance to a Hell’s Angel cruiser: a vast seat – a formula one derivative – and upturned easy rider handlebars amid a Heath Robinsonian mix of struts, forks, cables and chains. Queally, who will sit in front of the vast back wheel, with a second set of gears under his bottom, says: “If you stuck two eyes on the front, when the light reflects off it, it looks like a killer whale.”

  From October 1–6 at Battle Mountain, a tiny gold mining village in the heart of the Nevad
a desert, 420 miles from Las Vegas, Queally and his 30-strong team will compete with four others in the World Human Powered Speed Challenge for the world speed record currently held by Sam Whittingham of Canada at 72.24mph. His team’s initial target is 80mph, about twice the fastest speed Queally achieved in Sydney.

  The course is on five miles of Highway 305, which runs across the Nevada desert “virtually flat for 90 miles apart from a small canyon”, according to a local at yesterday’s unveiling. The highway has a traffic count of about 30 vehicles per hour, so it can be closed for about half an hour a day, allowing the five contestants one run each, during which they will be timed over a 200-metre stretch.

  Queally admits that he has trouble adapting to the recumbent position. “I got a recumbent bike for the road and in a quarter of a mile my legs were in bits. I need to spend time adapting to the position. It’s been a lot harder than I thought. I just thought I could jump in, whack in the thigh power and break the record but the power you can produce is limited by the position.”

  The Blueyonder machine, he feels, will be less painful than his training machine, as his legs are elevated but time, he admits, is not on his side: the machine was due to be delivered in June and he will not be able to test it in its final form until next week, when he begins training on the disused USAF airfield at Elvington in Yorkshire.

  There is a further complication. Queally will compete in the Olympic sprint in the world track championships on September 27 before he flies out to Nevada. He is trying to fit in at least one training session per week with his team mates Chris Hoy and Craig MacLean, with whom he will attempt to improve on last year’s silver medal.

  The quest for aerodynamics is not for the faint-hearted: once Queally’s support team have shut him inside the Challenger, he cannot open the cover and will need two people to “catch” him when he stops, so he does not fall over. Racing enclosed in a cover, without the wind to cool him down, entails other problems: overheating and condensation. “I’ve heard stories of people passing out in the past because of lack of air and I don’t fancy that,” he says.

  It could, perhaps, be worse. One of Queally’s rivals, the American Matt Weaver, will race totally enclosed in his machine, lying on his back with only two television monitors linked to a television camera mounted on its nose to show him where he is going. It is more aerodynamic that way, apparently. Queally and his team considered the “blind” option but he prefers to see where he is going. In the next few weeks, however, he is heading into uncharted territory.

  An amusing illustration of the things our Olympic gold medallists once had to do to earn a few quid. The attempt was not a success, but Queally was not the only one who struggled to capitalise on his medal. Bradley Wiggins had a similar experience after Athens: unlike those who followed them in Beijing, they had few opportunities.

  Cooke discovers winning form at last in wheel-towheel battle

  5 August 2002

  A stunning [Commonwealth Games] gold medal, taken against the odds and the form book in the women’s road race, confirmed in the most dramatic fashion that the South Wales wunderkind Nicole Cooke is successfully managing the transition into senior racing after her dominance at world junior level last year.

  It was, however, a close call on Saturday morning for Wales’s second cycling gold in the history of the games, as Cooke followed the track sprinter Louise Jones (1990) into the record books on the treacherous twisting roads of Rivington in the west Pennines, just north of the Manchester action.

  Although it was dry when she raced, the 19-year-old came close to crashing on a tight left-hander two and a half miles from the finish which had earlier claimed Margaret Hemsley when the Australian looked a possible winner, and she had to chase to catch up with the lead group before unleashing her finish sprint.

  In fact it was a wonder Cooke was in a winning position at all. After her disastrous ride in the time-trial the previous Saturday she had had to be put back together by the Welsh team staff, led by the team manager Shane Sutton.

  “She was in bits, emotionally shattered; she was in tears in the back of the team van,” Sutton revealed. “There had been massive pressure on her, with the press saying she was going to win three gold medals here. So we got her to come out and face them.”

  Afterwards, Cooke was found to be physically exhausted, after training too intensely before the games. “She was suffering from chronic fatigue and her carbohydrate stores were completely depleted,” said Sutton. To counter this, in the six days leading to the road race she was placed on a regime of “virtually no training, apart from the odd potter with the team and her brother”.

  If Cooke, from Cowbridge, has a weakness it appears to be her massive willpower, which can lead to her training too hard, as happened in the run-up to the Games. Sutton would not say as much but Cooke’s coaches must be concerned that she is overdoing it. Immediately after her gold medal ride she flew to the Netherlands for the women’s Tour de France, which started yesterday and covers 1,000 miles in 15 days.

  Hers was an unlikely victory in another way: when they escaped the peloton the lead group of a dozen included four Australians, and in the group of seven that fought out the finish she was without a team-mate whereas the defending champion Lyne Bessette of Canada had the support of Susan Palmer-Komar, the eventual silver medallist.

  Dealing with the tactics would have been daunting for a seasoned racer, let alone a 19-year-old in her first senior season. “There was a lot more thinking to do,” she said. Clearly she has an old head on her young shoulders. Sutton, who is also Cooke’s personal coach, had the look of a man who could not believe what he had just seen, and he would only say “it was a triumph of guts and class”.

  He was not the only surprised party. Three hours after the finish Caroline Alexander of Scotland was still stunned. She had finished fifth after launching the finish sprint with Cooke latched on her rear wheel, and could not believe the Welshwoman had won after watching her in the race: “She was going like a bag of spanners.”

  After her sprint through the leafy grounds of Leverhulme Park, where vast crowds gathered in the sunshine before the giant television screen in an atmosphere more redolent of rock festival than road race, Cooke was asked how she had managed to pull the win out of the bag after the time-trial trauma.

  “They are different kinds of event,” she said. “With the tactics in the road race, and being able to see the other competitors, it brings out a different side of me. I thrive on face-to-face competition.” In other words, once she sees the whites of the opposition’s eyes she is transformed. In cycling, that is the mark of the greats.

  This was a truly epic win, one of the best road race performances I can ever remember seeing. It set out Cooke’s stall as a future great. It was also one of the highpoints of the Manchester Commonwealth Games, which were a harbinger of what was to come in London at the Olympics 10 years later: massive, passionate crowds, helpful, friendly volunteers and top-notch organisation.

  UK Sport to consider Tour de France challenge

  4 August 2003

  Plans are under way to form a team to race the European professional calendar alongside the British world-class performance programme after the Athens Olympics as a stepping stone for aspiring British Tour de France riders.

  The team would be part-funded by outside sponsorship and would be registered in Division Two, one level below the Tour de France and World Cup races. Its formation is likely to be part of the plan for the next Olympic cycle, from 2004–08, which will be presented to UK Sport by Britain’s cycling performance director Dave Brailsford next year.

  “We’ve got to the level we’re at by being very tightly focused on track racing, but in the future we need to broaden our objectives,” said Brailsford. “We need a dedicated road squad to bridge the gap between riding for Britain and riding for Division One professional teams. In the planning for the next Olympic cycle, we’ll be looking at it very closely.”

  Since the
arrival of lottery funding in 1998, there has been continual criticism from the grass roots of British cycling that the bulk of the cash and the management’s focus has gone into track racing programmes. This has produced a steady flow of medals at world championships, and the healthy medal haul at the Sydney Olympics, but has done nothing to develop road cyclists to beef up the British presence at flagship professional events such as the World Cup series and Tour de France.

  Some of the riders in the team – totalling no more than a dozen – would be funded by the lottery as part of their track training programmes. They would race the road for some of the year, as they do already, as stage races on the road are the best way of developing endurance for track distance events such as the individual and team pursuit.

  “We already have a lot of the infrastructure such as vehicles, staff and equipment in place,” says Brailsford. “The plan would be to bring riders up through the juniors, take them to Manchester for a year, drill track racing into them, then they would have the option of the track or the trade team.”

  The inspiration, as so often, is Australia, which began pumping state funding into track racing in the early 90s but also developed a road programme which led to this year’s strong Australian showing in the Tour de France.

  Brailsford believes Britain can emulate this. “If we can compete as we have on the track in the last couple of years, that means in the long term we are capable of matching what Australia did in the Tour. They had seven guys riding this year, and I don’t see why we can’t aspire to that.”

  Enter Dave B and his professional team built on the back of the Olympic track programme; seven years before Team Sky hit the road the germ of the idea was clearly there. This idea would, in the short term, morph into the road academy run by Rod Ellingworth. In the long term, however, Great Britain would realise Brailsford’s vision of emulating Australia in the Tour de France.