RIDE BEYOND LIMITS COOKE'S TIMELESS RECIPE

Just six weeks after a health scare, 80-year-old Geoff Cooke won four masters world titles on the track, hears Tom Davidson

- Tom Davidson

When 80-year-old Geoff Cooke left hospital late last summer, the doctors told him he'd need to do a bit of exercise to bounce back from his treatment. "It was quite funny really," he begins to chuckle. "I think they were talking about walking. I said, 'Listen, you can't imagine what I actually do. I do 200 miles a week on the bike. I'm an Olympian. I'm a Commonwealth Games gold medallist. I've been doing it for years. I was national coach for 10 years. Cycling's been my life'," he pauses. "I don't think they quite believed me."

Every word Cooke spoke was, of course, true. He represented Great Britain as a track sprinter at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Fifty-two years later, he had been admitted to hospital for a gallbladder procedure, having been struck down by a gallstone that was causing him enormous pain. The timing couldn't have been worse. In six weeks, he was down to compete at the UCI Masters Track World Championships, the most important date in his calendar. He had only missed one edition since the competition was first held in 1995. All of a sudden, his octogenarian body threatened to end his near 30-year streak.

Cooke's first symptoms came five months before the Worlds on a cycling holiday with his friends on the Greek island of Zakynthos. "I said, 'Lads, you'll have to go on, I have to stop"," he remembers. "It had me on my knees. They thought I was dying, I'm sure they did." The pain soon eased off, but when Cooke returned home, he noticed that he was losing weight, so he took himself to the hospital. "They put a camera down, and they blew up my stomach," he says. "The doctor pulled the camera out, and I said, 'What is it? Is it cancer?' And she said, 'No, you've not got cancer. But your gallbladder's in a mess'."