It’s 30th June 2006 and Britain’s Nicole Cooke is in the town of Valréas, some 65km north of Avignon in southeast France. She is standing astride her bike, waiting for the start of the fourth stage of the 2006 Grande Boucle Féminine Internationale, the women’s equivalent of the Tour de France.
As she waits in front of the crowd, she finds an inner calm; all noise fades away as her thoughts turn back in time. She sees her 12-year-old self – the girl who had sat at home in the Vale of Glamorgan every summer and watched Tour de France highlights on TV;
