Georgie Howe has become a firm and reliable fixture in the Liv AlUla Jayco team, but she is a relatively recent addition to the cycling peloton.
The Australian only started racing following the outset of the coronavirus pandemic, having picked up a home trainer to keep fit during lockdowns.
Her rise into the professional peloton was swift, yet it was unsurprising given her history as a top-level athlete. Years spent pushing herself as a rower in pursuit of making the Australian Olympic team had well prepared her for becoming a professional cyclist.
Cycling was in her family — her father was once gifted a bike as a bonus by his work — but Rowing was Howe’s first major sporting love after attending a presentation by one of Australia’s ‘Oarsome Foursome’. The nickname was given to the men’s coxless four crew that competed between 1990 and 2012, winning two Olympic titles and four world championships.
“I was about 11 years old at primary school and it was a leadership conference for young people. He spoke and I came home and said to my parents I want to row,” Howe explained.
“Luckily, I went to a high school in Melbourne that had a rowing program and I started in 2008. Before that, I struggled socially as a kid. That age is always difficult and I was not having a great time. The rowing program gave me purpose and a bunch of people to hang out with. It gave me a commonality with people as well.”
Howe soon dreamed about following in the footsteps of the ‘Oarsome Foursome’ and competing at the Olympic Games. Trying to achieve that goal drove her passion for the sport and would ultimately take over the world.
“I always had the Olympic dream. I remember sitting with my head of rowing and going through the steps on how to get to Rio,” she said. “I had full blinders on going to the games and everything I was doing was either a detriment to that or helping me to get there.”
Her path to that Olympic dream took Howe across the Pacific Ocean to the east coast of the United States. With her strong rowing performances, she had caught the eye of some high-level universities.
Before she started her final year of secondary school, Howe paid a visit to Princeton — one of the USA’s eight Ivy League universities — to check out its rowing programme and get a feel for what she might study when she got there. Initially, she was intent on majoring in chemistry, but that plan changed during her final year of school when she took classical studies with a teacher that inspired her.
Early on, Howe picked elective classes that would ultimately lead her to selecting classical studies as her major, including lessons in Latin — which she had already started to learn in school.
“I had a very energetic and amazing teacher at high school, and he made me fall in love with the classics. You tend to do quite well and things you enjoy and I did quite alright. That was my best subject in my final year of school, and I was like, ‘oh, I actually had a lot of fun doing this, and maybe it’s cool.’”
Inspired by her love of the drama series Vikings, which was on at the time she was studying, Howe decided to focus her final thesis on them. Her teacher then guided her toward a group called the Kievan Rus, an off shoot of the Vikings that lived in what is now modern day Ukraine.
“I ended up writing my senior thesis on those people and the origins of Russian nationalism and Orthodox Christianity in that part of the world, and I dedicated my thesis to Michael Hirst, the director of Vikings,” she said.
Delving into the history of the Kievan Rus, and the Vikings, taught Howe about creating a collective identity that can help to foment culture. They would big up their wins on the various battlefields to do that and Howe sees commonalities between it and the use of social media in the modern age.
“What’s funny about the Vikings is, when they write their history, they really pump up their tires. To use a cycling analogy, the pump them to 180 psi,” Howe laughed. “I wrote my thesis based around the Russian Primary Chronicle, which was the earliest written text of these people. It’s written by a monk in the 12th century, and I couldn’t find mention of any of the conquests they were talking about in any Byzantine texts.
“They make stuff up all the time. Look at [Roman text] Virgil’s Aeneid that was just one massive piece of propaganda for Emperor Augustus, because he’s trying to create this identity of being Roman. I don’t know if that even happened after Troy, but it was a great story. It allows the people to latch on to stuff and then that forms the basis of the culture. The written word in classical culture is so important. We use the same thing nowadays with social media.”
While Howe was exploring her history books, she was still going all-in on her rowing dream.
She describes her determination to get to the Olympic Games as “tunnel vision” and, at times, it stopped her from making more of her years in the United States.
“Maybe if I had my time again, I would do it slightly differently. See a bit more, explore a bit more,” she said. “But a lot of those lessons and that perspective, I carry with me and implement it now.”
After finishing her four years at university, Howe returned to Australia and began working with the National Training Centre near Sydney ahead of the Tokyo games. It’s then when her love of the sport began to faulter.
The unified environment she’d found through school and university was no longer there. Howe was not enjoying herself and it was only her desire to reach the Olympic Games that kept her going. In the end, it wasn’t enough, and she ultimately found that her tunnel vision on achieving her goals had a negative impact on her.
“That laser focus was completely to my detriment in the end, in terms of the longevity within the sport,” Howe said. “Not so much to the physical progress, because I was still progressing, and getting my best numbers but I definitely could have relaxed a bit more and maybe I would have stuck with the sport longer, although maybe I wouldn’t have as well.”
The turning point for Howe was when she missed selection for the Tokyo Olympic Games, despite achieving everything that she’d needed to do to get there. Howe could have appealed the decision, but she chose not to and then took the huge step to quit the sport altogether.
“I thought I could keep bashing my head up against this wall or I could just call it quits and move on, and so I chose the latter,” she explained.
She went into full-time working with Ernst and Young (EY), where she had been working part-time prior to quitting rowing, and took up boxing. When facilities closed in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic, she bought a home trainer and started cycling again – Howe had already been using cycling as additional training for her rowing.
A year later, she bought her first-ever brand-new bike. It turned out to be a size too small, but Howe only discovered that when she joined GreenEDGE Cycling last season. A chance meeting with coach Nick Owen while out training after lockdowns were lifted put her on the path to professional cycling.
It turned out he’d seen her rowing power and had been keen to see what she could do on a bike. Initially, she was reticent to get into racing following her rowing experience, but she was tempted in eventually.
“I owe so much to him, not just like my cycling career, professionally, but also mentally. I was not in a good place from a mental health perspective,” she said. “I was not sure if I wanted to stay in consulting. I didn’t know what to do. I was in that classic like post-athlete stage of what am I doing with my life? I was going into my third or fourth year with EY at that and enjoying it, but I didn’t know if I want to do it long term. He has completely changed everything for me.”
Once Howe got the racing bug, her path to professional status with Liv AlUla Jayco was swift. Her first major race was the Australian nationals in 2022, and an opportunity to race in Belgium later that year showed to the wider world what she was capable of.
By the end of the season, she’d quit her job and signed a contract with GreenEDGE, where she’s exploring just how far she can go.
“I learned so much about myself from my experience in rowing, and that period after. In this past year, I’ve also learned a lot about myself and now I’m in this next phase of Georgie.”
Photo: Sprint Cycling
