Ruby Roseman-Gannon’s love of cycling was a slow burn.
Her father was a fanatic of the sport – and still is – and so it was natural that she tried it out. She had her first taste of cycling at five years old, but it certainly wasn’t love at first sight for the Australian road race champion.
“My dad rode his bike and then raced, mainly for his health, and he became obsessed with cycling,” says Roseman-Gannon. “He joined the Brunswick Cycling Club where Luke Plapp and Sarah Gigante also started, and Mitch Docker, who used to race for GreenEDGE Cycling. They have this clinic where you pay $5 a week and they have all the bikes there in all the sizes for every age. I started there when I was five.
“To be honest, I didn’t really enjoy it for a while. The first time I got onto the track bike, I crashed twice. I crashed once, then they restarted the race, and I crashed again. I didn’t mind it, I kept coming back every week, but I wasn’t really that competitive.”
The Liv AlUla Jayco rider was a sporty child, playing volleyball, football, and various other athletic activities at school. When she wasn’t out on the field or track, she could be found with her nose in a book.
Reading was more than a pastime for her, it helped her cope when she struggled with anxiety. Over the years she worked hard on dealing with those emotions, something she believes has helped her as a cyclist.
“I read a lot. I was obsessed with reading. I would max out the number of books I could get from the library, basically the whole young adult section of the library,” she explains. “I would say, particularly in primary school, I was quite anxious and I had to work on that a lot as I got older. I guess it also gave me the mental toolbox I have now to help me cope with normal feelings. Difficult feelings at difficult times.
“I feel like I’m one of the few people that I grew up racing with that just kept going. Maybe that adversity at a younger age, and having to get help and see a psychologist and be vulnerable and also have self-insight, has probably helped me keep going in some ways.”
Finding a career path
Despite the shaky start to her cycling career, the young Melbourne rider did finally find her passion for it. As she hit her pre-teens, she became competitive but earning a living wage from the sport never seemed like a reality.
Through her father, who was a women’s cycling superfan, she had heard of the challenges that top-level riders faced. When Roseman-Gannon started making her way through the junior ranks in around 2012, the UCI Women’s WorldTour didn’t exist, and female riders were still fighting for better coverage of their races.
The then teenage Roseman-Gannon decided that racing full-time wouldn’t be an option, and she’d need a separate career so she could financially support her own ambitions.
“There were so many stories of riders going to small teams and really struggling,” Roseman-Gannon says. “I thought that if I wanted to keep cycling, it’s going to be something I do on the side and I’m going to have to work to make sure I have some sort of financial stability to support my hobby. When people asked me what I wanted to do, I never really saw women’s cycling as being a job where you could save money or have any sort of financial security.”
With that in mind, Roseman-Gannon applied for university. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do for a career but opted to take on a Bachelor of Science at Melbourne University. It wasn’t a pre-defined course with mandatory classes and, instead, allowed her to sample a few subjects before settling on her major.
“I could choose every subject they did, there was no required subject,” Roseman-Gannon says. “I also had a programme where you did one subject per semester outside of your degree. I did creative writing, criminal law, and other arts subjects, which solidified my decision to do science. I chose neuroscience because I’d done a lot of psychology subjects and then physiology, anatomy, and biochemistry so it was the natural pathway for my major.
“I really liked neuropharmacology and there’s another subject that we do called ‘complex functions in neuroscience’. It was looking at consciousness and sleep. It was this big overarching thing, and at times, it was quite philosophical. What I really liked about [neuropharmacology] was that it looked at sleep and a lot of mental health conditions but in a very concrete way. They were looking at the pharmacological underpinnings and the neurotransmitters involved and stuff.”
From university degree to pro racing
University was a journey of discovery for Roseman-Gannon as she figured out what she wanted to do. As she approached the end of her course, she wanted to delve into a post-graduate degree to further specialise her studies.
“At the beginning, I didn’t know but towards the end I was looking at post-grad. With my university, it was great that it was so broad, but realistically, it was designed so that they would get post-graduates out of it. I was looking at medicine, physio, and neuropsychology, which is a field of psychology where you’re assessing and implementing interventions with people who have brain injuries or neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s,” she says.
That post-grad didn’t happen – or at least it hasn’t happened yet – as Roseman-Gannon’s career took off. During her degree, she’d managed to balance her studies with racing at some of Australia’s biggest events, including the Tour Down Under and the Women’s Herald Sun Tour.
After graduating in 2021, the same year she won the sprint jersey at the Santos Festival of Cycling, Roseman-Gannon secured a contract with GreenEDGE Cycling for the 2022 season. Since her WorldTour debut, the now 25-year-old has gone from strength to strength, claiming her first WorldTour win at the Tour of Britain, and is making her second appearance at the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift.
While she’s still fully focused on her racing career, Roseman-Gannon would like to like to eventually go back to her studies. However, she’s not sure that she will go back down the same path as she had previously aimed for.
“I’ve always planned to do that, though each year I stay a professional cyclist the further away I feel from the previous version of myself,” she says. “I feel like I’m forgetting a lot of the knowledge I had. Even the conversations I had in this life compared to my previous one are very different. I feel like a different person, but I do want to go back and do that.
“I feel like in the next phase in my life I’d like to prioritise other things like relationships and not being so focused on one thing. If that’s the case, then a post-graduate in medicine wouldn’t be conducive. That’s one thing I’ve been thinking about, whether I would do something that is a little less all-consuming.”
Top photo: Sprint Cycling
