Neilson Powless is making his racing return at the Tour of Austria this week after enduring a five-month wait to recover from a knee injury.
The American racer has only taken on three race days this season, all coming at the Tour de la Provence before he left the race on stage 3 with knee pain.
Since then, he's undergone surgery to remove inflamed tissue from his left knee which meant he'd miss the spring Classics. He's now finally back in the peloton for the five-day Tour of Austria, which runs from Graz to Vienna from July 8-12.
"I've been out of racing since the Tour de la Provence in February, but that month I had surgery, and it's been a pretty long process," Powless said.
"I was off the bike for five weeks initially, and when I restarted, we kept the recovery conservative. That basically meant doing 20 to 30 minutes a day on the bike for about two weeks.
"Slowly we built things up, and for the last eight or nine weeks I've been riding pain-free, and it seems like the injury is completely in the past. The knee is handling the load really well, and we've been able to set some goals."
Powless said that, while he's excited to restart his season in Austria, he's not setting any outlandish goals for his first race back.
"I'll be restarting my season in Austria, and I think that this will be a really nice race to get going in again. I'm looking forward to getting back into the peloton, and feeling like a bike racer for EF Education-EasyPost again," Powless said.
"I'm hungry for competition, that's for sure, but the main goal is to get through the race in one piece and come out of it in better shape than I went into it. There's not a huge amount of pressure at this point, but this is a good, hard race, and I do hope that I can compete for stages on a few days that suit me.
"The fitness isn't quite there in terms of looking at the overall standings, but this race should push me towards where I need to be for the second half of the season."
Twenty-nine-year-old Powless, who has won one-day races including Dwars door Vlaanderen, Donostia San Sebastián Klasikoa, and Gran Piemonte during his career, hasn't yet finalised his racing plans beyond Austria.
After missing the Tour de France for the first time in six years, it's as yet unclear whether a return to the Vuelta a España, where he competed in 2019, will be on the cards.
"The team have been super supportive throughout this whole process. The only pressure that I've felt is the pressure that I've put on myself to get back to racing," he said.
"The team have been really thoughtful when it's come to creating a plan of action and looking at what I've needed. They've always erred on the side of caution and moved things along as patiently as possible in order to make sure that I've healed completely. I'm in a really good place because of that."
