Georgia Baker’s childhood in Launceston, Tasmania was an idyllic one.
When she wasn’t at school or playing one of the many sports she competed in growing up, she helped out on her family’s farm. Now spending much of her year in Europe while racing in as a pro, she reflects on that time with fondness.
“I really loved growing up in Tasmania and I was lucky to grow up here. When I was younger, I grew up on a farm and I lived there with my family,” Baker says from Tasmania, having returned home for the off-season. “Looking back, my childhood was so much fun. I was always outside, helping my dad on the farm and always doing something on the weekend.”
Baker’s father wasn’t a farmer by trade – in fact he helped to run the family construction business as his full-time job. The farm was more of a passion project that much of the family happily got involved with.
“We had about 110 acres. On the farm, we had crops and we had sheep and cattle as well. My dad was a builder by trade. We had a company called the Baker Group so my dad would work full-time for the company and then on weekends he would farm,” she explains. “Farming was kind of a hobby. Our family helped, and a lot of our weekends were spent wandering around the farm and helping dad.
“My favourite thing was to drive the utes. When I was young, my dad would put his ute in neutral, and I could just see over the steering wheel, I would just have to steer the ute while dad fed the sheep off the back of the ute. I really loved doing anything with my dad and my family. I also loved it when we had shearing days. The shearers would come to the property, and I would help with the wool and marking the sheep.”
Leaving the farm
Life at the farm couldn’t last, though, as Baker and her sister got more involved in sports. In the end, it became too difficult for her parents to juggle full-time jobs and a farm while bringing their two daughters to the various sports they were involved in.
“The farm wasn’t too far away from town, but it was getting a bit hard for my parents to manage everything with our sports as well as the farm and normal work. I was really active as a kid and my parents encouraged it for us to try different sports and different things,” Baker says.
Before she discovered cycling, Baker was involved in a plethora of sports, from netball to swimming. Perhaps the most surprising one is taekwondo, where she achieved the rank of black belt.
“Nobody ever believes me, I always have to get my blackbelt out just to prove it. They’re always like ‘can you remember anything, can you remember any of your moves?’ but to be honest I don’t think I can. I was very young,” she says.
“I remember I was introduced at a race and they said: ‘Georgia Baker, also a black belt in taekwondo’. That was a lot of years ago, but I’ll take it.”
Like her teammate Amber Pate, Baker ultimately found a love of cycling through triathlon. By her own admission, the cycling leg wasn’t her strongest – not helped by the fact that she was doing it on her mountain bike – but it was definitely her favourite.
A chance to explore it further came when the Tasmanian Institute of Sport selected her as part of a talent identification programme. She was initially picked for rowing and basketball, but Baker was determined to do more cycling.
“I didn’t get selected for cycling because they didn’t want to intrude on any sports that you were already participating in,” she explains. “I asked if I could do the ‘cycling come and try day’ and they said that was fine. I wasn’t interested in basketball because I played netball and my parents were super against rowing because of the early mornings. So, I went up to the velodrome, the Silverdome, in Launceston and I really loved it. That’s how it all started.”
The moment it changed
As Baker got more into cycling, so did her family and her father bought his own bike so he could go riding with her.
“He hated me going out on the roads by myself in Tasmania so he got a bike to come with me. Then, my dad started racing, and my uncle got involved and my cousin and it ended up being a sport that a lot of my family started doing, which was really cool,” says Baker.
While Baker loved cycling, being a professional was not immediately on her radar. She just loved the sport and wanted to see how much she was capable on. Baker impressed early on, and it didn’t take long before she began to realise just how much the sport meant to her.
“I loved the Olympics, and I was obsessed with that when I was a kid, but at the time, I didn’t think I could go to the Olympics,” she says. “I remember the moment when I thought I wanted to do it as a job, it was my first national championships.
“I got selected for our state team and raced at track nationals. I got third in the scratch race and I was overwhelmed. I thought it was the best thing and I even cried because I got third and I was so happy. From that moment, I really wanted to make something out of it, and this was a sport I wanted to do.”
At the time, Baker was still competing regularly in netball, but she soon realised that if she wanted to make the most of her cycling talent then she’d have to go all in on it.
The decision to focus on cycling paid off for Baker and she eventually made her Olympic Games debut in 2016, before returning to take part in her second in 2021 in Tokyo and third at Paris 2024. Since 2022, she’s been racing with the Liv AlUla Jayco squad on the road, and she scored her first WorldTour stage win with the team this season at the Tour of Guangxi.
Spending time with the family
The road off-season means a well-earned trip home to Tasmania to spend time with her family. With a job that has her travelling the globe for much of the year, there aren’t too many opportunities to go back to Australia.
When Baker is at home with her family, it gives her the chance to do things she doesn’t get the chance to do when she’s in the thick of a season, such as baking.
“I really enjoy the process of baking, it’s really good for my mind and switching off a little bit,” Baker says. “When I’m at home, I like to cook and bake a lot more and then give them away to my family or people who come over. My favourite thing, which I do a lot with my sister around Christmas time, is to bake biscuits. We make kiss biscuits, which is a recipe that has been in my family for years and years.
“It was my great grandmother’s recipe. They’re two shortbread biscuits stuck together with raspberry jam and then icing and sprinkles on top. My great grandma used to make them for us at Christmas time so we would get a tin of them.”
Top photo: Sprint Cycling
