Jeremy Powers: "It's hard to be a fan if you don't know anything about it"

After the bpost bank trofee race in Lille, we had a long talk with Jeremy Powers (Rapha-Focus). The US national cyclocross champion is not short at words and offers us his toughts about the differences of racing in Europe and in the United States, the growth of the sport there, how to deal with the oceanic flights and his future plans. J. ‘Pow’ in person is the same cool guy you can watch at his famous Behind The Barriers tv show.

Hey Jeremy, last Wednesday in Maldegem you tried to set up the pace from the start of the race. How was the start of the race today?

I didn’t really move anywhere… I think that probably I was 15th, and then I made it to the group that had the12th place I think. And I made a few errors, I had like three spectacular crashes today, I ate shit good!. But that’s what I really like from racing here, at home I can seriously say that I didn’t crash in the whole season. We just don’t have the same type of technique tracks that you have here in Belgium, they’re always challenging. Today I found it like a good track for me though, fast and not such hard steep things, I liked today’s course, it was good for me.

Even with the sand?

We don’t do a lot of sand, but I mean, we never race a race like this at home but that’s why I like it, it’s different and it’s still cyclocross, against very good riders, the best riders and in the most challenguing courses.

The season is almost over, so what’s your conclusion?

Well, I think that the conclusion is that I won a lot of races that I hoped to win, I wanted to win a couple of category 1 races at home that I missed, Lousville, Iowa and Ohio, three race that I’d lost and I wanted to win and Tim Johnson and Ryan Trebon… I think that they had done very good training for thoses races and I made the decission that I didn’t wat to do another block for those race and these guys beat me good. In the States we have something similar to here, we have the C1 and the C2 race on the next day, and I was winning the on the category C2 days, but they were bringing more on the category 1 races.

Yes, related with this, we can see some races on the Internet, and also with Behind The Barriers, that you race two days in a row in the same course.

Yeah, that’s right, sometimes yes, but they change the course a little bit. The main reason is that we have a lot of amateurs rigind there, and they don’t want to go from Lousville to Ohio, that’s too far for a drive. Here you can do two races in different towns and it works.

But my season, well, it has been a very long season. I started racing in the end of Jul. We did our charity event on July, the Grand Fundo, and then I got married on July too. And then I started racing road every weekend, tours like the Tour of Alberta and then I came straight in the cyclocross season, all of July, all of August. This will be the last year that I race that much and this heavy.

And I won the nationals that was the biggest goal that I had, and how I planned my season.

What about the decission of not racing here this season, how was that?. Last season you took part in some World Cups in Europe, but not this one. Was it because of you, maybe the sponsors?

Both. When I look at last year, from the road racing, after that the blocks, and when I came out of the blocks, in the first World Cup I was 7th, then I won in Vegas, I won all the Category 1 races at home by good margins, I was definetely the strongest rider from the States, I don’t think that’s wrong to say. So I thought that I had a chance on the World Cup, and after being 7th I thought ‘I know what I have to improve on, I know what I have to do…’

But this year I had sponsorships lined up and they didn’t work out for me and that made me to reconfigure what I was doing, so that’s why a lot of energy went on BTB Tv, and I wasn’t racing the World Cups because the budget really wasn’t there, and it takes a lot of money, and a lot of time and energy, so if I’m doing the World Cup program on that conditions and I finish a race on the 35th place… people are gonna talk about that and don’t wanna have that on my chest, I don’t wanna do that to myself and I don’t wanna do that to the United States. That wouldn’t be good for my career.

Next year I think I gonna do most of the World Cups. The team will change in how it goes, I looking into turn it into a solo tema, a team of one really with the focus on my non profit team, the JAM Fund as also from benefiting from my sponsors. The plan is to build that up into a program and in three years be a full budget team. For right now we are gonna focus on me for a year and try to do most of the World Cups with Tom (his mechanic Tom Hopper) and Mario (his belgium host) and my family, the best as we can, and then see how that formula works.

So that’s a thing that it’s different from here and the europeans, there are a few things that must be put in place for an american to come to race the World Cups. It’s not like ”hey, today Rob Peeters is coming to a race that is 15 minutes from his house”, that’s not possible for me, even tough Mario is glad to have me here. We had to look at jet lag, we had to think that the season has a lot of racing from July,… And I think on that, more than ever the europeans do have respect for what we do, at least for me, a lot of them say hello to me and stuff like that, and that was not the case when I was here ten years ago. It takes good races, being in the podium with Francis Mourey, with Sven Nys in Vegas, with Niels Albert in Cincinatti last year. Now they have that respect and understand how much the travel is, how difficoult it is.

I can imagine… I’m sure it’s not easy, and if you look at Katie Compton this season, I guess that it has been really hard for her…

Absolutely, she’s empty. And I think it’s great for hear, to have a season where se won the World Cup overall again, she beat Marienne Vos that has been unbeteable for a long time, there is a lot of great thing to be happy for, and ok, Worlds didn’t go perfectly but, you can’t have everything, noone has everything.

And the jet lag is hard for racing…

You have to look at it from a profesional athlete point of view. These guys… they wouldn’t do their own laundry, they don’t do anything, everthing is done for them and the one thing that the’re not doing is missing two nights of sleep and if you are flying back and forth you’re missing that two nights of sleep, and that’s not good for a bike racer. And if you miss a night of sleep, you miss form, and if you race in the weekend and you beat yourself in a really hard race… and then you have to flight back home, do you see how that can end up?, it’s just one thing after the next. You have to formularize it, and there’s a formula… this year I was able to fly to London in the morning from the United States and that was a really big change for me because we left the States at 8 a.m. and I get into London at 9 p.m., and I didn’t miss a night of sleep, a soft transition, and this is an important for me of how it’s gonna work for the next year, cause I gonna have to do this trip three times for the World Cups. And you also have to think in the logistics, Tom has to be here before, bikes and bags have also to be already here.

How do you see the cyclocross scene in the US?, it has been growing a lot over the last few years.

Definetely. I thing is great that the sport in general embraces the fact that is getting more international and that’s one of the things that I push forward like a lot of interviews, and I know that these guys don’t read every interview that I do, but I say, I would like to talk to you and tell you as a group how important we are. Here in Belgium the scene is incredible, it’s like the 70% of the people are watching it on Tv, and that’s perfect, but let us as a group to help the other countries grow because then it means that there’s more international sponsors, not just for me but for you guys as well, it’s more money in the sport and everyone can grow.

And for the US side, we are in a great place, the sport is growing, organically, people are seeing it and say ”what is that?” ”I may gonna do that”, and they are learning a bout it, they’re buying a bike, they’re getting a coach and because it’s one hour, and it’s a really family event… in the United States you can go with your children and have them a race and you can do a race and you can sit our underneath the canape, it’s like camping, it’s liek a football game. It’s a lot of fun and actually it’s how a lot of kids are getting into racing or cycling in general because parent can watch their childrems race, for eight minutes in a lap they can watch them four of five times and they feel save, so a lot of kids get in cycling through cyclocross, and I think that’s great for the sport and for us as a country.

And how does it work racing in the US?, you have to travel a lot. Jonathan Page told me that he would need more money for racing there that here in Europe.

Yes, for sure. And then we go back to the logistics. It’s not easy, we have to have someone who drives all the equipment to the events, we have to fly and to have someone to pick us up and the’re so many things that are going on that it changes the dynamic. I have travelled 50.000 miles this year for racing, and when you’re doing that you’re missing some training days. When I look at us as the US circuit, I don’t thing that for doing that I’m better than Lars van der Haar, or than Kevin Pawels or whoever, I know much I have put into the training, how much effort it takes, but I don’t think on ”well those guys don’t do that on the World Cups”.

This season I have seen the United States juniors racing a lot of races here in Belgium. What do you think about that?, it’s a good thing for their future?

Again, going back to that travelling formula I thing that we have a lot of work to do in how we bring juniors over here to race and when. I guess that what I’m trying to say is, are they competitive with the World scale?, and I think they are, and I also thing that there’s a lot of heritage here in Belgium that is giving them a good feedback, to let them know how hard and how good they need to be. And we don’t have that yet in the United States, someone to look at, that heritage and tradition. This is exactly how it goes, every rider here from they’re 13 have someone to tell them ” you do base training, you do some racing, you only do this amount of races, you don’t over race, you go easy here, you’re taking a good break, you’re coming back and you do more long rides…”. We don’t have that.

Being the United States national champion, do you feel more responsibility to promote cyclocross in your country?

It’s something that I do, national champion or not. That’s if you see Behind The Barriers, it’s for the sport, for growing the sport in the United States, so we have a place to look into, to the personalities and for the people to watch and become a part of, a part of the sport. It’s hard to be a fan if you don’t know anything about it, and with regular journalism is not enough to know who Bart Wellens is, not enough to know who I am as a person and how I do interact with people, so you have to be smart and do more than that, you have to showcase great races and hard ones. So that’s the way how I look at it, we are trying to do something better, and we need to have someone that cares. For a long time we have been like ‘Please, listen, listen, watch this, this is great’ and I think that for a long time noone was getting it, but now they are able to see these battles and understand how much goes into these races. And then of course when we came over here and we do well, that works as a validation, because if you are top ten in a World Cup you’re not just a good rider in the US, you are a good rider in the World.

Jeremy, what about the JAM Fund? Do you plan to keep working on this project?

With JAM Fund we have charity events, we raise money and give grants to up and coming kids from my area that don’t have warmers, don’t have money to go to races, don’t have bikes, don’t have whatever, they need coaching, they need to know about everything. We help them to race in the local New England series, and we send them to the national championships. We paid to guys like Jeremy Durring to race here in Europe before turning pro. This year for instance has been a great year for the project, and we are still learning with the project, but it’s growing, and now that I am thinking in bringing my sponsors to the project we are gonna turn it in a more profesional way.

We have helped a lot of kids already and we keep on doing it. We gave grants to kids for racing the nationals, but also for coming to the Worlds. In the US, if you are not one the top two riders you have to pay… even the junior that won nationals we granted him I think with 500$ to come to the Worlds. So it’s not like we can do everything because we are not that big yet, but hopefully…

I think that if you at the top, you should do something to build up the sport. I don’t want to say this in a pompeus way, but if you are good… people are gonna listen to me more than to Jeremy Durrin. If I say ”Look, this is how this should be, we have to pay for that, this should be part of the program, or we need to do this…” then I can help others. If you are Sven Nys you should have different conversations about the World Cup going to Tokyo, cause people are gonna listen to him more than are gonna listen to me.

And for the JAM project, we wanted to be a long term project and even if turns into more professional we don’t want to lose the charity at all, that’s the only reason of the project. This year we bought a van like this one for going to the races, we have 20 bikes, we are helping more and more kids and every year grows a little bit. Moreover, it’s not only for the cycling, we help people to grow up at social level, to integrate them into the local community.

Are you organizing the Grand Fundo charity sportive this year too?

Yes, it’s going to be on the 19th of July and it’s going to be even better. We are working on some cool stuff, with more food stops and better food, ice cream, mini burritos, etc. And all it’s just to keep it fun, it’s not a race, you can do whatever you want. It’s going to be awesome.

If you look at the future, for how long do you plan to race at professional level?

I’m 30 now, maybe until I’m 35, so that would be to go for five more years. I have a lot of experience and I think that I can do a good thing in cyclocross, so if I can race for 4 or 5 years more then it could be a great career, a great chapter or first chapters of my life.

For now, I going to focus on the next three years and then I will look at the big picture and see where am I and the achieved goals, if then I can make it to the tope ten of the World Cup, the 7th, the 5th, the podium would be the moon!. Right now I want to improve and help the sport to grow in the United States. It’s all relative to where you came from, if I’d grew up in Belgium there it would be a different story.

And after racing, I really don’t know, what I would like something related to the sport.

One last question Jeremy, you won a junior mountain bike UCI World Cup in Napa Valley back in 2001. What happened on that time? Do you ever regret of leaving moutain bike racing?

Money in the States dropped out of mountain biking. That year that I won the World Cup, I turned pro for mountain biking, and I was 17 years old and I was racing against pros, and I was doing well and I was strong, and then I was not going to the college but getting a pro contract. But I got mononucleosis and for six months I was dead. The contract went away and by that time mountain biking was going downhill in the United States, we lost the Norba National series, contracts were going down. When I came back I wasn’t immediately at high level. On that time I moved to Massachusetts too, where I live now, road racing was going up, I went it and progressed fast, then Jelly Belly signed me and mountain biking was done for me.

 

For more information and entertainment you can visit:

www.jamcycling.org/

www.behindthebarriers.tv/