Newsgroup: it.sport.ciclismo
Titolo: Nicole Cooke, Tigress Woods :-))))

http://foureyesgood.blogspot.com/2006/10/sportin-life-nicole-cooke-tigress.html
Thanks to Sue Mott for this interview. Daily Telegraph, today.
Ask the next person you meet (excluding the Welsh in bicycle clips) if 
they have heard of Nicole Cooke, the answer will probably be a scratched 
head. Mmm, it sounds vaguely familiar, doesn't it? But few would put a 
face to the name. Celebrity chefs, shorts-dropping footballers, models 
in unwearable clothes and expressions, we know them more intimately than 
strictly necessary. But the world's No 1 woman cyclist, to the mass 
British audience, represents the great unknown.
She is one of the front-runners – on merit – for the BBC's Sports 
Personality of the Year award (albeit if anyone can be bothered to 
schlep up to Birmingham's National Exhibition Centre). But will the 
public vote for a woman who works offshore with foreign nationals and 
wears a helmet? We like to see our sports stars, get to know them and, 
if possible, feel sorry for them. Joe Calzaghe, the super-middleweight 
champion of the world for nine years, hit a rich vein of truth when he 
said the public were dreadfully inclined to vote for losers.
Cooke never was, nor will be, a loser. At the outset of her career, 
winning senior events at the age of 16, on-lookers concluded she must 
possess a pushy father. Tony Cooke was indeed enthusiastic, but then he 
had to be. "I remember mornings at home when a gale was blowing and the 
wind was lashing down, lying in bed at 6.30am, inwardly praying that I 
wouldn't have to get up. But, sure enough, the door would be flung back 
and Nicole burst in: 'Come on, Dad…' She was 11." His daughter, now 23 
and on top of the world, ruefully acknowledges the claim. "Dad and my 
brother, Craig, never seemed to have the same urgency as me. It was 
always me that wanted to get out of the house. I think I suffered from 
Pushy Daughter syndrome, not the other way round." There is still the 
touch of the Tigress Woods about her.
Made by her father, at least inspired by him, she simply took to the 
pedals at a formative age and stayed there. The result is a formidably 
talented, ferociously competitive, gong-loaded individual sportswoman 
who possesses not the fainted shadow of starry-self regard and who 
celebrated her arrival at the grand summit of women's road racing, the 
moment she became world No 1, by opening a bottle of sparkling wine with 
a team-mate. "But I only had one glass," she said.
It will not make any difference that she is off-duty now, October being 
the month of freedom after the competitive season. During her first day 
of holiday she cycled round the lake in Zurich. For pure pleasure. She 
is obsessed. "I know," she said happily.
This week, she moved to Lugano, wrestling all her worldly goods 
including her bicycles into a four-by-four. "I like living in 
Switzerland. I like the climate, the mountains, the lakes. The Swiss 
people are nice too. They follow the rules. They wait at red lights." 
Which is probably important to a cyclist.
Communication is no problem. She used to ride for an Italian team, and 
so learnt the language from a book. Now she rides for a Swiss-German 
team, Univega-Raleigh-Lifeforce, and has been learning German since May. 
It must be working. "Sometimes I find myself swearing in German." Not 
Welsh. "No, it's the language of God. There are no swear words in 
Welsh." (She is, by the way, the 2003 Welsh Sports Personality of the 
Year. She was also runner-up in 2002 when the prize was won by Mark 
Hughes, the former Wales football coach. "And he wasn't even a sportsman 
at the time. He was a manager," noted Cooke without rancour.)
You can see instantly that she is a doer whose consistency is born of 
loving her profession. She is even a little bemused by her advancement 
to the very pinnacle of her sport. "It still hasn't sunk it. It's a bit 
strange to think about it. But I'm very proud. It doesn't happen to 
everyone." It probably means nothing to the non-cycling world that she 
won the World Cup series this year. Nor that she won the women's Tour de 
France having led from start to finish. Nor that she was victorious in 
the Thuringen-Rundfahrt (Sue Barker will probably not pronounce that 
one), the Fleche Wallonne, the Castilla y Leon and the biggest TT race 
of her career, the Magali Pache Lausanne. It is with infinite cheek, 
given that our national sport – football – is overrun with Europeans, 
that most of us wouldn't know our Magali Pache from the M11.
But women's cycling has a professional cast list not much smaller than 
women's tennis, about 200 full-time racers and a few hundred more in the 
hinterland. Yet while Maria Sharapova has a net between her and her 
opponent, Cooke has about a centimetre in a peloton of up to 150 racers, 
taking downhills at 60mph, risking serious life-long injury, and 
necessarily involving regular crashes – three of which in the last 12 
months have split her helmets and mangled her bikes. "I looked at my 
helmets, in pieces and thought that could have been my skull."
Cooke is a forthright young woman, mature beyond her years. She is 
neither cowed nor exalted by her sporting life, but when she needs to 
make a point, she does. One of those points was drug-related. Paula 
Radcliffe-like, she made her stand. "My first season in 2002 was a very 
eye-opening experience. There was one Belarussian girl and one Ukranian 
girl, team-mates, sharing a room with me. One evening having come up 
from dinner they got a syringe out. I thought: 'Oh my god, what's going 
on here.' No medical staff around. Just one untrained 27-year old trying 
to administer something to another rider. I decided I was never going to 
ride with that team again. Afterwards, I let it be known: 'Don't do 
things like that in my room again. I don't like needles. I don't like 
it.' I made it very clear. But it's what happens, you know.
"The team manager would say: 'Oh, Nicole, you're not riding very well 
today. What do you need? Amino acids? Anti-oxidants?' But why would I 
want to experiment during a big stage race? There's no logic to it. If 
riders are at the stage where they do need supplements or boosting, then 
firstly they're not in a fit state to race and secondly, what are they 
thinking of, administering this stuff without medical staff around? For 
their own safety, not for mine. Unfortunately, for the Ukranians and 
Belarussians it was the normal thing for them. And if they're happy to 
take things from the white shaded area – legal – then it won't be long 
before they're happy to take things from the grey-shaded area.
"I really thing taking anything is a sign of weakness that your own 
body, your own mind, isn't strong enough." As for the men's drug-riddled 
tour, she regrets the slurs it imposes on the women by association. The 
descent of the 2006 men's Tour de France into shame and farce disgusted 
her. "I was shocked. And unfortunately the women's tour, which is not as 
well-funded as the men's, is tainted and suffers Her personal suffering, 
however, is more focused.
"What is torture to you?"
"Riding badly," she said immediately.
"Torture?"
"Oh yes," she said, "and being injured." While most of us would regard 
torture as taking a hairpin bend on two thin wheels at ludicrous miles 
per hour with hell-bent rivals swishing alongside and large chunks of 
France falling away to left and right, Cooke is tortured by sitting 
down. She must do it sometimes. Respite is only professional. But what 
is her default position? "Pedalling," she said.
She was disappointed to claim only bronze in the World Road Race 
Championships this year in Salzburg, but initiates would understand that 
it was, in fact, a fine effort, given the complete absence of an elite 
British team to support her. Team tactics in road races are often as 
crucial as puff and pedalling like mad. While temporarily infuriated, 
Cooke was eventually able to review her third place behind Marianne Vos 
of Holland and Trixi Worrack of Germany as "not the end of the world".
She is not always so measured. "I wouldn't kick a cat but I remember one 
time when I crashed and the team car came to pick me up and it wasn't 
very nice. I couldn't get up from the road by myself because I was in so 
much pain. I'm just lying on the floor. Gently I was persuaded to get up 
and as soon as I was on my feet I was carrying on and swearing. I could 
have launched the whole bike off the mountain in frustration. It really 
gets to me sometimes."
She explains all this rather hesitantly. As though remembering that her 
father, head of science at a large senior school, is proud to hold her 
up as a role model. "Not being hugely famous, it's easier for her than 
Wayne Rooney to keep her balance," said Tony Cooke. "But she's got a 
difficult path in front of her because no British cyclist has ever been 
down this path before." Indeed, British world No 1s are not exactly 
littering the country in major(ish) global sports. But do not for one 
minute accuse her of making sacrifices for her present prominent perch. 
"Sacrifices!" she positively spluttered. "Everything I get from cycling 
is a positive gain, not a sacrifice. Even when I retire" – this is a 
far-flung land in her mind, somewhere around the age of 35 – "I shall 
always ride."
In the meantime the move to Lugano admittedly does not sound like much 
of a sacrifice. Own home, lake, beauty, fresh air, Swiss efficiency, 
Italian language, Italian men. Perhaps she might meet and marry one.
"I wouldn't know what destiny has in store for me," she said with 
ultra-caution. But having an analytical brain, perhaps inherited from 
her scientific father, she computed the thought. "Swiss-Italian 
perhaps." She hasn't had time to go gathering a significant other and in 
her early 20s, a dedicated sportswoman, it would be slightly insane to 
do so.
"I wouldn't really say time was the problem. More the fact that I have 
never been based in one place. Being constantly on the move, seeing 
people a few months here, a few months there, can cause quite big 
problems logistically. Most of the time, the distance between us and 
moving around is the reason relationships haven't worked out.
"It's a bit frustrating. But it's not like I'm lonely." Some women would 
call that a sacrifice. But probably not the type who enjoys a bike ride 
pointing vertically downwards. Cooke is a personality, all right.
-- 
http://modesta.biciticino.ch
Il sito dedicato alla giovane ciclista lituana Modesta Vzesniauskaite

 Welsh."
Got to learn real quick.
Sergio
Pisa