A suspicion lingered that the deeply unsatisfactory testimony offered by Sir Dave Brailsford to an investigative committee of MPs a month ago might have remained just that: words by a man in a sharp suit and waistcoat revealing the apparent indifference to suspicions surrounding British Cycling which, in the broader scheme of things, would actually signify nothing. There was an air of hubris about the swagger with which Brailsford thought he had killed questions about a questionable Jiffy bag package sent to his riders, though the fine details of who knew what and when commanded just a few days’ attention before the caravan moved on.

It took Nicole Cooke’s force of personality to blow away the cobwebs of indifference on Tuesday. It is a challenge for a woman in any sport to challenge its establishment head on, let alone one in which women’s struggle for competitive parity has been so gradual that in the recent past their part was almost non-existent. Cooke was more than equal to the task.

It is by no means the first time that she has revealed a willingness to stand up and be counted and her testimony to the culture, media, and sport select committee will certainly not be lost in another fog of indifference. Her hour of testimony was eye-watering, eviscerating at times, and if it does not shake the sport, it governors and its anti-doping authorities into some serious self-scrutiny then nothing will.

Where UK anti-doping (UKAD) is concerned, the questions are complex. How has it come to pass that an organisation so fundamental to the sanctity of sport is also engaged in the tawdry process of generating its own revenues, with less funding for its task than five years ago and yet far more work to do? Such is the “chocolate sword” organisation Cooke so memorably described. Yet her disclosure of having twice presented personal evidence to those responsible for fighting doping in the UK without getting any sort of satisfactory reply is no less than a scandal.

Where cycling is concerned, Cooke telegraphed the reality of being a woman in the sport. She also ripped away the veneer of suspicion which coats Brailsford’s story of the Jiffy bag’s contents - allegedly, a decongestant - and why a British Cycling employee was sent hundreds of miles across Europe with it, without asking what the contents were, when the product which was freely available at local chemists, at a price of eight euros.

It cannot be said that British Cycling has done nothing to deal with the woeful inequality in its sport, which at the 1984 Olympics offered women only one competitive event and only achieved parity between men and women at the 2012 Games. Women cyclists indicate that the strategy to bring them into its governance and coaching, launched in 2013, has helped. British Cycling does have 20,000 women members and the number of women coaches is growing. Rachel Atherton, Emma Pooley and Sarah Storey have played a part in governance and campaign work.

But the sport is light years behind tennis, for example, where equality is concerned and though that is, in part, a consequence of the extraordinary pace with which the sport has accelerated into the place it assumes on Britain’s sporting landscape, it needs a force of nature to take it on, and soon. Someone to ensure that if the independent review into its culture which British Cycling has commissioned delivers some unflattering home truths next month, then there will be someone to ensure that it is a trigger for change.