BBC Wales Sports Personality of the Year competition. Cooke signed for the Acca Due O Team for 2003 and a new UCI regulation limiting team sizes split the Acca Due O squad in two for 2003 so Cooke rode for the new Ausra Gruodis-Safi Team with many of the younger riders. She rode for the merged and renamed Safi-Pasta Zara Manhattan Team in 2004 and 2005. In 2003 Cooke won La Flèche Wallonne Féminine, the Amstel Gold Race, the GP de Plouay and the GP San Francisco. She was the 2003 UCI Women's Road World Cup champion, youngest to win the competition and the first Briton. She came third in the world road championship. Cooke was voted BBC Wales Sports Personality of the Year. She hit a stationary police motorbike in June at the Tour du Grand Montréal required stitches in her left knee. Three weeks later she crashed again at the Giro de Trentino and had to miss 4 weeks of racing in July and August. A winter and spring of rehabilitation failed to cure the recurring knee problem and she had surgery in May. At the end of June in her first race in eight months, she won her fifth British title. The following month Cooke won the Giro d'Italia Femminile, the youngest winner and the first British cyclist, male or female, to win a Grand Tour. At the 2004 Summer Olympics she placed fifth in the women's road race and 19th in the road time trial. In 2005, she again won La Flèche Wallonne Féminine. She also won the GP Wallonie, Trofeo Alfredo Binda and the Trofeo Citta di Rosignano. She came second in the UCI Road World Championships. At the end of 2005 she joined Swiss-based team Univega Pro-Cycling for two seasons, moving to Lugano in 2006 where she still lives. In October 2005 the Welsh Cycling Union (WCU) selection commission decided to send a full team of six male riders to the 2006 Commonwealth Games, centered on supporting the aspirations of the National Coach Julian Winn, but also decided that Cooke would be sent as a one-person team to defend her title. In April 2016 Cooke would cite this as an example of the sexist attitudes of the sport she encountered throughout her career in an article - Welcome to the world of elite cycling where sexism is by design. In December 2005, when preparing