POWLESS THE GENERATION GAME
We carry our past and our childhood with us. For EF Education-Nippo rider Neilson Powless, the winner of the Donostia Klasikoa on 31 July, these include a chilling tale of racial violence and revenge he heard many times growing up.
Simon Antoine, an Oneida Native American, was jumped by four white men. They beat him up and left him for dead. But Simon Antoine survived. He crawled to safety, recovered, then hunted down his assailants and killed them one by one.
It’s uncertain when this happened: it must have been around the 1820s, when the Oneida were moved from what white America calls New York State to Wisconsin, a thousand miles away, and the reservations where they are now concentrated. But Simon Antoine certainly existed. He lived into the age of photography and posed for a picture that made its way down the generations, via his Oneida descendant Marcella Sickle, to her grandson, Neilson Powless’s father Jack. When Powless and his older sister Shayna, also a pro cyclist, were growing up, the photo hung on the wall of their parents’ room at home in Roseville, 20 miles northeast of Sacramento in north California.
They speak of Simon Antoine with pride. Jack even had his ancestor’s image depicted in gold leaf on the bodywork of his Harley Davidson.
“A buddy of mine, a really good artist, did it. It was so lifelike. But I
