“Une baguette s’il vous plaît.”

“La lavande.”

The florist smiles. Frances’s favorite fruit seller waves.

“Bonjour!”

“Bonjour! Des abricots, s’il vous plaît.”

Frances puts a basket of newly picked apricots in her rattan bag and heads for the sea. It’s hot down by the port. A few men are out working on the boats. Masts clang. Gulls caw. Teenagers buzz around on Vespas, but most Niçois are gathered in the shade, eating their morning croissants and sipping espressos and fizzy water.

Frances hops from the promenade down onto some stone steps that lead to a rocky beach. She walks along the coast, past bronzed bodies and blue-striped parasols, following a path cut into the cliffs. Villas rise from the sunburnt hills, while boys spring into coves of green-blue water. She talks about the Fitzgeralds and the Murphys and the soft Riviera light that inspired Matisse’s paintings, while she takes photos with her film camera. In her rope-soled shoes, she moves over the rocks like a dancer.

Hers seems like a charmed life, and it is. But being married to a bike racer isn’t always glamorous.

In a few weeks, Frances’s husband Neilson Powless will depart for his fourth Tour de France. Le Tour demands a lot from them. Neilson knows what Frances gives up for his career, the days she spends alone. He is determined to make her sacrifices worth it. Last summer, he nearly won a stage and came within a few seconds of wearing the yellow jersey. Now, he wants to prove that he is a winner. And he has been winning from the start this season. Neilson has newfound motivation. The day before his first race, the Grand Prix Cycliste de Marseille, Frances called him to tell him that she was pregnant. The next afternoon, he attacked on the last steep rise and held off his chasers all the way down the zigzag descent to Marseille. He reached the finish line solo. Knowing that he is about to become a dad made him realize just how precious his opportunities are. Now, he is racing to support their family.

Neilson went on to win the yellow jersey at the Étoile de Bessèges and made a strong debut in the Flemish classics this spring, impressing the Belgian press with his third place finish at Dwars door Vlaanderen and fifth at De Ronde. He had only a few days at home in Nice before he had to head to Font-Romeu, France, where he spent a month training for the Tour high in the Pyrenees. He has just finished the Tour de Suisse. Then, he will be gone for another month at the Tour. Frances is proud of Neilson. She loves their adventurous life together. It’s just that she sometimes feels like she hardly gets to see him.

She and Neilson have always had to find their own balance though, even if it is sometimes a dance. Frances is a ballerina.

She skips onto a stony outcropping overlooking the harbor. The city sparkles across the water. She settles down with her apricots and tells the story of how she and Neilson met and the life they are building together.

At first she thought he was a teacher. Frances was performing with the Sacramento Ballet and Neilson was home in California for the off-season. He had said that he worked for EF-Education First. When she and her roommate looked him up on Google, they found that he had a Wikipedia page. Who was this guy? Frances’s roommate had to convince her that the soft-spoken man she had been talking to was actually a professional athlete.

On their early dates, Frances would get a little mad when Neilson said he had to go home at nine thirty. She was used to ballet, where performances last long into the night, and the after parties last even longer. She and her roommate would tease Neilson about his shaved legs.

“He would be like, ‘Yeah there have been a lot of studies that have been done in wind tunnels that prove that it is aerodynamically effective,’” Frances says. “We were like, ‘Yeah, we know. We’re just messing with you. There are a lot of dancers who do that for aesthetic reasons.’”

When she was growing up in Houston, Texas, Frances didn’t know too much about cycling. She used to watch the Tour de France during the summer holidays at her aunt and uncle’s. Maybe that is where she got her love for France. She had always dreamed of moving to Europe. As she and Neilson started spending more time together, she realized that they actually had a lot in common.

“We had both very niche careers, so he understood the questions you get like, ‘So what do you really do?’” Frances says. “We both know how much commitment it has taken us to get to where we are. Neither of us went to college. We went straight into it. We both realize that there is this time sensitive element to what we do, that it is really important to just be able to focus on it and give it your all while you can, knowing that it is temporary and is not going to last forever.”

Frances and Neilson both enjoyed the daily discipline of training and working towards a big performance. Cycling seemed lonelier though—and more scientific—while Frances’s world of ballet was very social and artistic.

“I think my first impressions were—honestly, I was just really confused,” Frances says. “Neilson’s family are all very ingrained in sport, because they are also athletes. His mom ran the Olympic marathon. His sister is a professional cyclist. They have been around for so much of his career and were coaching him from such a young age. I feel like he has a pretty unique perspective. They helped develop him, but it was all new to me.”

As different as their backgrounds were, Neilson’s athletic, analytical mind helped him to understand ballet. Frances was soon learning about cycling too.

“Neilson would ask me these questions about dance that were really specific and that no one had ever really asked me before,” Frances says. “Neilson loves routine and puts so much care and measurement and precision into his training. In cycling, you go out training for six hours without seeing anyone. I would just get bored trying to dance for that long in a studio. So much of dance is being inspired by the people around you. Once I started meeting more cyclists, I kind of got a gauge of whether he was insane or not. He is really not the most severe or the most relaxed. I respect that the level of focus and commitment that he has is what has gotten him to where he is. That just took a bit to wrap my head around. Once I started understanding it, I saw that cycling does have a lot of similarities with ballet. There are principles and you are all working towards a greater goal, but every one has a role.”

The same is true of their marriage.

A black-and-white photograph of their wedding hangs in the spare, light-filled apartment where Frances and Neilson now live in Nice’s Old Town. They stand with their families, embracing on the edge of a cliff, as waves explode on the rocks below them. That vision has helped them navigate the tumult of their first years together in Europe, moving from place to place and making compromises for each other, only to spend many long weeks apart.

From the moment that Frances and Neilson met, they knew that they would soon have to be away from each other. After their first fall in the States, Neilson returned to Europe to race, while Frances stayed in California to dance. When he was away, Neilson realized that he always wanted to be with her. He proposed when he returned to the US after that season.

He took Frances for a picnic in Houston’s Eastern Glades Park, set out a charcuterie board, and hid a ring in one of the wine glasses. Frances said yes. She decided to give up her spot in the Sacramento Ballet and move to Europe with Neilson.

She has since enjoyed exploring all of the towns where they have lived. As beautiful as places like Girona and Andorra are, day-to-day life in a foreign country is not a holiday though. Living abroad comes with its challenges. Bills need to be paid, bank accounts set up, apartments found. Navigating bureaucracies in languages other than your own is so much harder. Even the smallest things, like getting the right train ticket or ordering a coffee at a café can be difficult, and all of those daily efforts add up. Life in a foreign country can be exhausting, especially when you’re on your own, especially when you can’t dance. That’s why Neilson and Frances moved to Nice. They wanted to create a life for themselves beyond the bubble of professional cycling.

“We have been figuring out what this looks like for me, for us to be together, and for me to still be doing what I love and pursuing something that I am also passionate about,” Frances says. “I would say that he is probably the most invested in my career, probably even more than I am, and sometimes I worry that I am more invested in his too. I think that is just the empathy that comes with being far away from friends and family. We just really rely on each other for that support. There are definitely sacrifices that come with the lifestyle, and we often have to step back when things are feeling overwhelming, and take a look and realize that we are not necessarily going to be having this opportunity to live in Europe forever, and we just need to enjoy it and try not to get too overwhelmed with the harder parts that come with it as well.”

Frances auditioned for roles in several European ballets before she got pregnant. Neilson was ready to move to wherever she found a spot. Now, she is working as a photographer, another love of hers.

“I started photography in high school,” Frances says. “I took classes, and we would develop film in the darkroom, and I have just continued it. When I was dancing in the States, I had some co-workers or colleagues who would ask me to do little shoots for them or for the school or stuff like that and it just developed into something more. Film photography is what I use more everyday and for traveling, because I don’t like to carry around my huge DSLR. Especially since we are getting to explore so many cool parts of the world right now, it is something that I like to keep up, and it is a nice way to be able to share with people, my family and others, and show them where we are.”

She draws her range finder to her eye, advances the film with her thumb, and lets the shutter fall with a soft thwack. At the moment, she is in Nice, on the Côte d’Azur, where she has fallen into a group of friends who share her love of dance and art. It’s becoming home.

A few days earlier, they’d sat under the trellises of the Paloma Beach Club, flowers, cards, and thick wrapping paper strewn over the white table cloth, as a warm breeze blew in off the Baie des Fourmis. Glasses tinkled. Kids swam out into the bay, where sun-bleached yachts bobbed in the bright water. Frances admired her new stack of children’s books, old favorites in English and new ones in French, as she and her friends tried to pick Neilson out from a pile of baby pictures. Her aunt had flown over from London to help her friends organize a shower for her on Cap Ferrat. She feels very fortunate to have met them. Jaat Benoot, brother of the racer Tiesj, dances for the Monaco ballet and introduced her to the Riviera’s creative scene. In this world, she blooms.

“Jaat lives with an American who is also a dancer and they got me into the dance scene here,” Frances says. “That has been really nice, just having that kind of community too. We were in Girona before, and part of why we came to Nice was that there was not a lot of art or dance going on there, so it did not feel as if there was any avenue that would open up for me. It felt like I was just going to be fully closed off from what I knew. Nice is nice, because we get a mix. We get the community through cycling, but it has been nice to also make friends in the dance world. I feel less like my success or happiness is riding on Neilson’s results, and I feel like that is better for both of us in a way. I think we’re finding a balance of me now having my own life as well as having a life that is really centered around Neilson’s career, because he is gone a lot, so it is important that I have those relationships and make friends and have enough things to do, so that I am not just hiding out inside and feeling overwhelmed by being in a foreign country.”

With her ballet friends, Frances can laugh at the eccentricities of the mad, wonderful life she is now living. To understand what it’s really like to live with a professional bike racer you have to live with one though.

Frances’s stomach lurched. She and her friend Summer were on a girls’ trip to Positano, learning how to drive standard in a rented convertible on a coastal road above the Med, as cars screeched around the corners towards them, when a friend messaged that there had been a crash. Their guys were at a race in Belgium. They parked around the next bend and put the feed on Frances’s phone. The announcer said that EF was down. On the tiny screen, they could see pink jerseys gathering themselves up, and then Summer’s boyfriend, the American rider Brandon McNulty, rolling on the road. They tried not to fear the consequences. One bad crash could end their loved ones’ careers—or worse. He got up. He was fine. Neilson was still at the front of the pack; he had missed the fall. Every time he starts a race, Frances worries that he’ll end up in the hospital.

“I have learned to not watch until the end, because I can’t really handle a hundred kilometers of nerves every single day,” she says. “Summer and I were talking about this, and my sister always teases me, but during the Tour, we’re like, ‘Oh my god, we need a rest day. This is so stressful.’ It’s definitely nerve wracking, especially because on a given day, I usually know what his goals are.”

When Neilson is really going for a result, Frances will get more nervous than he does. She knows how hard he works and just how hard it is to get a big win. Neilson could train for months to be in the form of his life and make one wrong move and roll away with nothing, not knowing when he’ll get his next chance, like last year at the Tour de Suisse.

It was Neilson’s last big race before the Tour. Going into the final time trial, Neilson was fourth overall. He had made it a goal at the start of the year to finish on the podium. Frances traveled to Switzerland with a ballet friend from the States. They had taken the cable car up to Malbun, just over the border in Liechtenstein, the day before and screamed for all they were worth when Neilson arrived at the summit. Down to one teammate after a raft of positive COVID tests had sent the others home, Neilson and Jonas Rutsch had made an awesome effort across three alpine passes to keep Neilson in the running. Now, she was standing by the barriers in a sweltering Swiss town, refreshing ProCyclingStats every thirty seconds and watching the GCN feed on her phone. The time splits showed that Neilson had a strong start, but then he started to fade. Coming into the final kilometers, it was close, but he was still ahead in the race for the final podium place. Then, he dropped his chain. A quick bike change got him going again and he managed to save fourth, but the podium was gone. When Neilson came across the finish line, his face was grey and drenched with sweat. All Frances could do was give him a hug, while he tried to catch his breath. And then Neilson smiled. There was an ice cream shop around the corner.

“Hey, let’s go get ice cream,” he said.

Sometimes, Neilson’s calmness just baffles her.

“In general, he is just a pretty happy guy, so if it doesn’t go well, he doesn’t really process by moping or dwelling on it,” Frances says. ‘That’s really not how he is. Sometimes, I will just be like, shouldn’t you be more upset?! At the end of the day, I am just happy if he comes home alive and okay, but I sometimes wish that I could somehow help him. When I am watching a race and he is getting dropped, I’ll be like, ‘Go! I wish I could just give you my energy now’, but I know he is not not trying. It’s just that he is maxed out. It definitely takes empathy, especially because I don’t ride. I find that my friends who are married to cyclists or dating cyclists and are cyclists themselves understand physically what is happening, whereas I tend to look at it more from an outsiders’ perspective and am just like, ‘Push harder! Try more!’ Even though I know that sometimes he just can’t. That’s part of the nature of the sport, and that is what keeps him going, getting a taste of that and then just wanting more and more, getting a glimpse of having it all at the right time and place and everything working out.”

Neilson had five minutes. Five was the magic number. Frances knew that. With five minutes at the bottom of Alpe d’Huez, Neilson’s breakaway could stay away all the way to the top. She stood at the summit, watching the big screen in a scrum of soigneurs. She had taken the gondola up and watched from a crowded café with some girlfriends as Neilson took off. The moment the commissaire’s flag dropped, he’d raced up the road. Once others had made it across, he’d driven the break. ‘Stay off the front Neilson, stay off the front Neilson,’ they had said. Frances knew just how badly he wanted this one. Neilson had had one heck of a Tour. In the first week, he’d come within a few seconds of pulling on the yellow jersey. Ever since, he had been trying to redeem that lost chance. He had attacked and attacked, trying to force his way to a win, but had always come up short. Magnus Cort’s stage ten victory relieved some of the pressure, but no one puts more pressure on Neilson than Neilson puts on himself. And now, he was at the foot of Alpe d’Huez, the most iconic climb in cycling, on Bastille Day at the Tour de France. A win would be historic, life changing, the biggest moment for American cycling for decades. Frances almost let herself hope. Neilson matched the first attacks. She knew he was tired. Was he playing it smart? He looked in control. He kept dragging himself back up to the front, but his pedaling looked strained. When Tom Pidcock went, Neilson couldn’t go. All he could do was ride his own rhythm through the partying crowds and hang on for fourth. Frances met him at the finish line and gave him a hug, unfazed. She walked beside him to the hotel, and then they sat together in the cool mountain sunshine, while he ate his rice. It hadn’t been the right time or the right place. One day, it would be, and then this disappointment would make that moment all the more meaningful. Their phones buzzed. So would the support of all the other young families from the peloton, who were now messaging them, with whom Frances and Neilson share all of the sport’s ups and downs.

“I remember when we were watching San Sebastien in 2021,” Frances says, “I was just at home watching it alone, and Neilson was in the breakaway. He was going off the front, and all of my friends started texting me and were like, ‘Oh my god, I think he is going to do it.’ And then Sepp Kuss’s girlfriend texted me and was like, ‘Sepp says it is going to come to a sprint; Neilson has the best sprint.’ And I am just sitting there in my apartment alone, screaming, like ‘Oh my god,’ but that was fun because there were more people than I realized tuning in and they were all messaging me and they were so excited, even though we weren’t physically watching it together. And then we can talk about the stress of things like being home in the off-season and kind of floating between family’s homes and that sense of just wanting to be in your own space or being on holidays and the guys are still training. I just remember laughing when I met them, like, ‘Oh my gosh; I am not alone.’”

Soon, Frances will rarely be alone. She saunters home, past the swimmers and around the sauna-like port, down the crowded promenade, to sweet, citrusy streets and their apartment. She is just starting to show under her light floral print dress. Their baby is due in October. She and Neilson will travel to the States for the birth and then come back to Nice. Frances is nervous, but her girlfriends tell her it’s going to be the best thing she could possibly do, even if it will be hard. She has always wanted to become a mom. And she knows that when bike racing is over, their family will be what lasts.

“It is a pretty unique thing to have to move to another country or continent to support the person that you are married to, and I mean that in a good way,” she says. “It is a very beautiful thing, what it requires of you. I don’t think there is a question of whether or not we support each other. We had to decide for each other pretty early on in our relationship. Oftentimes, it’s hard, because to our friends and family back home, it is this glamorous life we live, which it is, but at the same time there are a lot of challenges. I didn’t necessarily think, ‘Oh I will marry a cyclist and live in Europe.’ Sometimes, it is just shifting and readjusting how you see your dreams and realizing that you are getting to live them. Just by focusing more on someone else’s priorities than your own, I think it just helps you relax in some ways, when you are not only thinking about yourself and your own ambitions. For Neilson too, he always says that it is nice that he knows that he is working for our family now and our future and it is not so much anymore just about being a neo-pro and on his own and only thinking about his own training.”

She walks in the door, and Neilson gives her a kiss. He’s home from his ride. He makes her coffee and then they sit on their couch and look at the scans they have just got back from their French doctor. They can just make out the little hands and feet. They have already found a créche. Neilson puts his hand on Frances’s tummy. Their baby is just starting to kick.

It is strong like a cyclist, like a dancer, like a Powless.