Neilson Powless has signed a deal to remain with EF Education-EasyPost for the next four seasons, the team announced on Tuesday.
The 29-year-old enjoyed a strong 2025 season, winning Dwars door Vlaanderen from a breakaway with three Visma-Lease a Bike riders, outwitting Wout van Aert, Matteo Jorgenson and Tiesj Benoot.
"I never thought in a million years that I would try to win a cobbled classic, but it happened this year, and now I am chomping at the bit to back it up and build a spring around Monuments racing," Powless stated in the team's press release.
"I haven't won a Monument yet. And that's definitely a goal that I want to hit. But, just being able to be in the mix of every Monument I've started shows the completeness and the diversity of the athlete that I have become. It makes bike racing super fun, because I can go to every race and get involved in the action."
After his victory in April, Powless went on to score top 10s in Brabantse Pijl, Liège-Bastogne-Liège and Eschborn-Frankfurt before taking his second victory in the GP Gippingen. He closed out the season with top performances in San Sebastian, the GP de Montréal and Gran Piemonte, cementing his reputation as a one-day race specialist.
"I don't think I ever would have realized that I could be a classics rider until I joined this team," Powless said. "This team is famous for its outside-of-the-box tactics. Letting me go to the classics, or the way Ben [Healy] raced into the yellow jersey at the Tour, or just the way we race the Tour every year, shows that. It makes it a really fun team to race for.
"Our tactics are always exciting and there are a lot of opportunities here for a lot of guys. That has helped me progress. I have found my niche in cycling here. Being opportunistic in hard, hard races has really paid off. That's the way I've learned to race and the way I want to keep racing. This team is just the perfect environment for that."
Powless joined the team in 2020 after two seasons with Visma. Starting out as a climber, he showed promise as a stage racer at the 2022 Tour de France, finishing 12th overall and narrowly missing out on taking the maillot jaune.
Since then, he has turned his focus to the classics, finishing in the top 10 in Milan-San Remo and the Tour of Flanders in 2023 and at Il Lombardia last year.
"I've transitioned into this opportunistic one-day racer, who's able to race on almost any kind of terrain – cobblestones, climbing, flat, circuit races, or just super long point-to-points like Sanremo.
"I think I have developed into a really complete rider during my time on this team. The way that we go to races and try to achieve results has brought that out of me. I am really happy and proud of the kind of rider I have become."
EF Pro Cycling CEO Jonathan Vaughters explained why the team extended Powless' contract for four years.
"We all know that Neilson's work ethic is basically second to none. He's going to train as hard as he possibly can, until the day comes when he can no longer race a bike," Vaughters said. "That is so in his nature. I have no doubts that his performance will continue to be excellent. Slowly but surely, he is learning real race craft too.
"Neilson was sort of a bull in a china shop in years past, using his power to fix problems. He's learning to be a bike racer now. His race craft and his ability to tactically read a race has improved considerably. That is going to help his performance over the long term. He will be able to win more races, because he knows how to be a better bike racer now than he did before."
