Riley Amos on his first year as an Elite and his love of product development

With Pace

Payson McElveen

Photography, Interviews, Adventure, Basketball, Mountain Biking, Outdoors, Entrepreneur, Athletes, Culture, Current Events, Inspirational, Health & Fitness, Society & Culture, Sports, Gravel Biking, Gravel Cycling, Celebrities, Cycling

4.8 • 767 Ratings

🗓️ 1 February 2026

⏱️ 94 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Most riders spend their first year in the Elite ranks just trying to find their feet, but Riley Amos was determined to be different. He had good reason for it. Not only did he have a dominant final season as a U23 in 2024, but he also finished 7th at the Paris Olympics, the highest an American male has ever finished in the Olympic XC race. Looking back on his mindset coming into 2025, though, he admits that he might have pushed himself a little too hard. Riley sat down with Payson in Gi...

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	I'm Pace McElvin and this is the With Pace podcast.
0:11.8	I think I remember being like, okay, if we can hit a couple top tens, it's a great first year.
0:17.2	Yeah.
0:17.8	And like that was the mentality, but I think deep rooted inside me that
0:23.0	winner was like I'm determined to be different. So I think I just really had a bit of a
0:31.0	closed mind that winter and just I overtrained a little bit. I overworked myself too much. Like
0:36.3	I was just fucking tired. Interesting.
0:38.6	Tired, tired.
0:44.0	Hello, everyone. Welcome back. Last time we had Riley Amos on was the summer of 2004. He was in
0:50.9	the middle of kind of an unbelievable season coming off of seventh at the Olympic Games,
0:57.3	which is the highest of any U.S. male rider ever.
1:01.6	Incredibly dominant final year in the under 23s.
1:05.2	But now in 2026, entering his second year in the elites,
1:09.6	I wanted to check in with him again to kind of see how
1:12.7	he's settling in to this pro career now. He's in his second year of his new contract with
1:20.2	Trek Factory Racing and had a 2025 season that didn't fulfill his expectations or at least the expectations that he
1:30.6	kind of built for himself on the heels of such an incredible dream 2024 season.
1:35.8	And so I wanted to check in with him and see what his thoughts were from a year that no
1:42.3	doubt afforded a lot of lessons and learning opportunities as tougher seasons can do.
1:49.7	And I've always really appreciated interviewing Riley because he's really thoughtful, kind of wise beyond his years.
1:57.0	And he had some really interesting thoughts about how World Cup races are won,
2:01.3	kind of the intangibles that maybe don't always come through on the TV,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Payson McElveen, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Payson McElveen and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.