'Nicole Cooke has offered a critique that British Cycling would be foolish to ignore'

Comment: Arguably the most talented and neglected British rider of her generation, British Cycling could do worse than take heed of Nicole Cooke's words

(Image credit: Yuzuru SUNADA)

Nicole Cooke has been making waves and breaking boundaries in cycling since she first emerged as a staggering all-round talent in the mid-1990s, when she was a regular winner of road, cyclocross, mountain bike and track races, often leaving a line of boys trailing in her wake when there were no girls to compete against.

An Olympic and world road champion and twice the World Cup winner, Cooke had established herself as one of the all-time greats of road racing when she retired in 2013 at the age of just 29.

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Peter Cossins has been writing about professional cycling since 1993, with his reporting appearing in numerous publications and websites including Cycling WeeklyCycle Sport and Procycling - which he edited from 2006 to 2009. Peter is the author of several books on cycling - The Monuments, his history of cycling's five greatest one-day Classic races, was published in 2014, followed in 2015 by Alpe d’Huez, an appraisal of cycling’s greatest climb. Yellow Jersey - his celebration of the iconic Tour de France winner's jersey won the 2020 Telegraph Sports Book Awards Cycling Book of the Year Award.