.. with his Olympic dreams within reach, a troubling medical condition led to a heartbreaking halt in his rowing career. “I’d blackout at the end of hard efforts or even during them… When I was 19, I’d started to do under-23 rowing and I’d got to quite a high level already. But I’d had a couple of episodes of blacking out, and my coach had then gone to speak to British Rowing and he said for that summer of racing, I wasn’t going to be able to compete, due to it being a safety risk,” Baker shares. “I’d got myself into the first eight, into the top boat that year. I’d spent the whole winter training to essentially just be told ‘you can’t race any more this summer.'”..From rower to road racerThis abrupt end to his rowing season left Baker at a crossroads, one that led him to revisiting his childhood passion for cycling. “I was like, ‘fuck it’, I might as well make the use of my fitness somehow. So I thought, ‘Well, I used to cycle when I was younger’… and we used to do cycling as cross training for rowing,” he says.So, equipped with a £900 Dolan, he entered into a few races and immediately did well. “I got out of fourth cat doing a solo time trial off the front, from the gun. And I remember speaking to my brother afterwards… and he was like, ‘What power did you do?’ And I said I’d done like 360 [watts] or something for the hour as a fourth cat and he was like, ‘I think you should probably give cycling a go,'” laughs Baker...To be honest, I enjoyed the sport a lot more than I enjoyed rowing. Because I found that when I was rowing, I was more doing it because I was good at it. I won races; that was my enjoyment for it really. Whereas I liked riding my bike winning or losing, which I think makes a big difference when you’re trying to get to the pinnacle of a sport, you can’t just enjoy it for the results ultimately can you?”
