Roseville’s Neilson Powless ascends peaks of Tour de France pecking order
This time last year, Neilson Powless was tasked with helping his teammates in the Tour de France by putting pressure on other riders. His job was to try to exhaust them with pace.
This year, the 25-year-old world-class cyclist and Roseville High School graduate, is racing like the top rider on his team, not just a lieutenant.
“They were looking to him not being there (at this level) for another year or two,” Powless’ father, Jack, said this week in an interview with The Bee.
Powless this summer is participating in his third Tour de France and was ranked as high as second in the overall standings after the fifth and sixth stages. He was four seconds from earning the coveted yellow jersey following the sixth stage after finishing 43rd in the race last season, 13 spots higher than his debut in 2020.
“He’s not a flash in the pan, he’s solid,” said Bruce Hendler, who used to work with Powless at his Athleticamps training center in Folsom. “He continues to grow, he continues to learn, he continues to get more experience and more depth in his fitness as a pro and learn what it takes to be a professional athlete. That, to me, is the sign of success now and even more success in the future.”
Powless, who’s writing blog posts for VeloNews throughout the Tour de France, described his early performance in the world’s biggest race as a “rollercoaster.”
“Honestly, I don’t know how else to describe it,” he wrote. “I keep having random rushes of emotions. At one moment I feel like I could break down and curl up into a ball and then the next moment I feel like I’m on top of the world and realizing that I’m achieving childhood dreams. My mind keeps going back and forth from those alternate states but when I’m in the race I feel like I’m still able to focus on the task at hand and racing with my EF Education-EasyPost teammates.”
While Powless’ role with the team was more clear last season — he was directed to help Rigoberto Uran, the team’s top racer — finish as high as possible. His role in 2022 is a bit more ambiguous. His fans in Folsom believe he’s becoming the new star of the team, thanks to his early performance.
“Ultimately at the beginning,” says Hendler, “he’s not the team leader by definition. But as it’s developing, he sure as heck looks like the team leader. And my own opinion, of course, is they should give him that role to give him the experience and learn what it takes to be that way.”
Powless’ ascension this season didn’t come without adversity. He had to drop out of a race earlier this year after testing positive for COVID-19, his father said. He also had a bout with food poisoning and a respiratory infection.
But his season got off to a strong start with an 11th-place finish in the UAE Tour in February. And in the lead up to the Tour de France, he had encouraging finishes of 14th in the Tour de Romandie and fourth in the Tour de Suisse.
According to Jack Powless, the directors of EF Education-EasyPost are letting Neilson develop at his own pace rather than pushing him to become the leader of the team. Perhaps that lack of pressure from the top is helping Powless develop into a rider to be reckoned with as he goes deeper in the prime of his racing career.
“They’re not pushing Neilson whatsoever,” Jack Powless said. “They’re wanting him to just progress the way his body wants to progress and not trying to push it. They know his numbers and they know what awesome potential he has, so they’re not wanting to overdo it with him. They know everything’s coming, and like I said, they were looking a couple years down the road for him to be a (general classification) guy. So this came as a pleasant surprise. I wouldn’t really say a surprise, but they were really happy to see how his progression has gone over this past winter.”
Powless is expected to return to the Folsom area in mid-August where he will continue his high-altitude training in the Sierras before the back half of the 2022 cycling schedule.
In the meantime, the Tour de France will continue through July 24, with the 21st stage finishing in Paris.
This story was originally published July 13, 2022 at 3:00 AM.
