Cyclist
Pro team history: Univega
It’s 19th April 2006, and the last kilometre of the ninth edition of La Flèche Wallonne Féminine is approaching. The riders are starting the race’s final climb, the short but brutal Mur de Huy with its sections of over 20%. Every kilometre of the 105km ridden so far has been leading to this point, the climb where the race will be decided. First one to the top wins.
As the climb gets underway, Oenone Wood, leader of the German Nürnberger team who have been working hard to set up this very attack, makes her move. Wood pulls away and the group of 27 riders around her starts to disintegrate. In second and chasing hard is Britain’s Nicole Cooke, leader of the Univega team.
The climb steepens. The famous hairpins and that 20% gradient come into view. Wood is still leading but Cooke is a two-time winner of this race and knows its finale well. She may have been unable to match Wood’s attack but Cooke is well aware that the 400m to the finish line can feel like an eternity and knows the race is still up for grabs.
As the slope eases slightly, Cooke begins to close the gap, inching further forward with every painful pedal stroke. With 100m to go she is level. Then, gritting her teeth, she slowly and agonisingly pulls clear. In the closing metres she puts daylight between her and Wood, who will also be caught by T-Mobile’s Judith Arndt and Nürnberger teammate Trixi Worrack. Finally the finish line arrives and the British Champion throws her arms in the air and lets out a cry of celebration.
Cooke has just taken her third Flèche Wallonne title in four editions. She has also just recorded Univega’s biggest one-day win to date and its first at World Cup level, setting up what will turn out to be a remarkable 2006 season both for her and her team.
Team bonding in an igloo
The Univega bike brand had entered pro cycling the previous year. The outfit enjoyed a successful start to 2005, claiming a number of victories, most notably Karin Thürig winning the Souvenir Magali Pache (a time-trial ranked one level below World Cup status) and Priska Doppmann securing La Grande Boucle, a race many considered as the closest thing to a women’s Tour de France but which officially was classified as a national event and carried no UCI ranking points. Thürig also won the Time-Trial World Championships.
As the 2005 season closed, team management were looking to take the squad to the next level. Cooke was out of contract at Safi-Pasta Zara and available. A deal was struck to bring her to Univega with the brand’s sister company, Raleigh, paying Cooke’s salary and providing her bike frame. In December 2005, Cooke met her new teammates in a Swiss mountain resort.
‘We were to stay in a giant snow igloo, which had several rooms where even the tables and chairs were carved out of ice,’ Cooke writes in her autobiography The Breakaway. ‘There was also a room without a roof that had a jacuzzi so you could relax by simply looking at the stars… it was a great way to bond the team together.’
Fast forward four months and Cooke had secured that maiden World Cup win in La Flèche Wallonne. A little more than two weeks later the British rider claimed the team’s second World Cup race, the GP Castilla y León. Stage wins for Priska Doppmann and Joanne Kiesanowski at the Tour de l’Aude (the biggest women’s stage race in France at the time) followed, before Cooke took her first Grande Boucle, leading the race from start to finish and wearing yellow over the top of Mont Ventoux.
‘I wanted to ride this one on my own, ahead of all my rivals, wearing the yellow jersey just as I had seen in all the old magazines and books,’ Cooke would later write of that stage. Three weeks later she claimed four stages and the overall at Thüringen Rundfahrt.
Those results and others meant that Cooke would finish the year at the top of the UCI’s rankings, with her Univega team similarly placed in the team standings. It had been a remarkable season for a team some had questioned the strength and depth of at the start of the year.
‘Each rider has a part to play in the overall success of the team and we all take great pride in what we do,’ Cooke said at the end of the season. ‘There is the opportunity for every rider to get results and to improve. We all get on really well together both on the bikes and off the bikes. That is perhaps part of the reason why we are so successful together and makes for such committed team riding.’
The following year, now under the name Raleigh-Lifeforce, the wins continued to flow. The pick of the bunch was probably Cooke’s victory at the 2007 Tour of Flanders, a masterclass in team tactics that saw Thürig attacking and forcing Cooke’s rivals to work long before they wanted, with the pair then working over the final selection in the closing kilometres.
Cervélo came in as the outfit’s title sponsor for 2008 and, while Cooke had left to lead the British Halfords-Bikehut squad, the team remained one of the biggest in the sport. One race that had eluded them however was the biggest stage race in women’s cycling at that time: the Giro d’Italia (then branded Giro Donne). In July 2009 that was something new signing Claudia Häusler, who had finished third in 2008 for the Nürnberger team, corrected.
Häusler took her first major win for the team in May 2009, claiming the Tour de l’Aude before going to the Giro. The team tasted success on the first stage with Häusler’s teammate Kirsten Wild winning the evening prologue and putting on pink for the first time. Wild lost the lead the next day but fellow Cervélo rider Emma Pooley regained it for the team after Stage 3 and held the pink jersey until Häusler assumed the race lead on Stage 6. The German then won Stage 7 and took pink to the finish three days later.
‘These were perfect days in Italy,’ Cervélo sports director Manel Lacambra said afterwards. ‘We won the Giro, we had several stage victories and we also won the points jersey and the team classification.’
Pooley would go on to claim major wins for the team in 2010 – winning both La Flèche Wallonne and the Tour de l’Aude – before the outfit folded at the end of the 2011 season citing funding issues.
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