🏔️ Joy Baker answers the phone with an apology.
“Sorry, I did miss your call earlier; I was out cycling.”
Not a quick spin, either — two and a half hours up Egmont Road, the climb that runs from her home in Hillsborough near New Plymouth toward snow-covered Mt Taranaki. And she wants it known, gently, that this wasn’t even a big ride for her.
The 75-year-old is still easing back after bursting a blood vessel in her eye, three weeks off the bike while it settled. Coming down off the mountain, the cold started to bite. It was nippy, barely above freezing, with a wind chill factor that had most firmly tucked up by the fire. Baker shrugs it off in the retelling. It’s just what training looks like in Taranaki in winter.
It’s a fitting way for SBR-Tri.com to reacquaint with the newly-named flag bearer for Team NZL at the 2025 World Triathlon Age-Group Championships in Pontevedra, Spain, this September. Because if there’s a throughline to Joy Baker’s story, it’s this: nothing much seems to stop her.
Just 75, and 27 starts deep
Baker recently celebrated her 75th. Age groupers know the significance, and not because of what others see as a lifetime milestone. “I just turned 75 in June,” she says, “so it’s a good time” referencing being tipped into the 75-79 age group for the first time.
Good, but not without a flicker of concern about where that leaves her two years from now. By the time the World Triathlon Championship Finals land in Tauranga in 2028, she’ll be 77 — squarely in the upper half of her bracket rather than the fresh-faced newcomer she is right now.
“Usually the best time to go to the Worlds is when you’re just into the new age group,” she says.
It’s a reasonable worry on paper. In practice, her own results suggest she needn’t lose too much sleep over it. At Wollongong last October, racing at the top end of the 70-74 bracket at 74-years-old, she still won standard distance gold and sprint bronze. Age, for the Taranaki Triathlon & Multisports Club legend, has a habit of not mattering quite as much as the calendar suggests it should. And anyway, Tauranga is a goal for another day.
Pontevedra will be her 17th World Triathlon Championship, a streak stretching back to her debut at Rimini, Italy, in 2008. It was a first Worlds that very nearly didn’t happen at all. It took her years to qualify before that, held back not by fitness but by a weakness in the water.
“I was coming out of the water last,” she says with a laugh. “My swimming wasn’t up to scratch.”
A couple of years of lessons fixed what raw effort alone couldn’t, and once she broke through, she never really stopped.
She travelled to that first Rimini campaign with two other couples from New Plymouth — “We had such a good time” — and something about that trip clearly stuck, because the World Championship start list has had her name on it most years since.
Ask why she keeps coming back — 27 individual race starts across those 16 previous campaigns, multisport festivals often bundling several events into a single trip — and there’s no talk of times or medals.
“I just enjoy it, really. And I love the people you meet as well. I just love the training for it — it just keeps you going, I think, in life.”
Three starts, and unfinished business
In Pontevedra she’ll race three events — sprint, standard, and the mixed relay — on a course she already knows a little something about. It’s her second visit to the Galician city, and last time out she came home with gold in the Super Sprint and silver in the Aquabike, back to back days of racing that still seem to surprise her when she talks about them now.
This campaign has come together despite the obstacles stacking up around it. Her husband Don, who usually travels with her, isn’t making the trip this time — the logistics around a tour afterwards just didn’t line up. Canterbury Tri Club legend Shirley Rolston, has also pulled out injured, the two of them having been due to share a room and, as it happens, an age group this year. Baker takes it in stride. She’ll room with someone new, travel with the wider team, and get on with it, much as she always seems to.
It’s the same instinct that had her back on the bike within weeks of a burst blood vessel in her eye, and the same one that sends her up Egmont Road on a morning cold enough to numb you to your core. Why? Because the training doesn’t do itself.
Thankfully the garden at home in Hillsborough kept her active during the downtime and she admits to being “quite pleased” with the labours of her enforced downtime. It’s beautiful proof that even her recovery weeks aren’t really time off.
If you want further evidence that age is just a number, watch out for the proud Kiwi waving the New Zealand flag in Pontevedra.
“I can’t believe it, really. It’s trying to sink in, I think.
“Very proud, yes. It is a really great honour.”
The honour is mutual as far as Team NZL is concerned.
Team NZL Age Group team for Pontevedra
