The Quiet Engine: Brandon McNulty and the Art of Serving Two Masters

Professional cycling is often framed as a duel between superstars. The cameras follow Tadej Pogačar, Jonas Vingegaard, and Remco Evenepoel up the steepest climbs, and the narrative revolves around their heroics. But just off screen, operating in the same brutal wind and gravity, there is another caliber of athlete. They are the ones who empty themselves so a leader can win, then somehow find the legs to chase their own isolated victories days later. Brandon McNulty has made peace with this double life, and in that uneasy balance, he has quietly become one of the most versatile American riders of his generation.
To understand McNulty’s value, it helps to rewind to stage 15 of the 2023 Giro d’Italia. The day was designed for a breakaway, and McNulty slipped into the move early. On paper, he was a strong rouleur with a good time trial; in reality, he was a danger man the peloton misjudged. When he attacked solo with over 60 kilometers remaining, a collective shrug likely rippled through the group behind. Surely the American would fade. Instead, McNulty held his aero position with uncanny stillness, ticking off the kilometers with the precision of a Swiss watch. He crossed the line in Bergamo with his arms outstretched, a grand tour stage winner for the first time. The victory was not an accident—it was a delayed unveiling.
McNulty was born in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1998, and he carried the desert’s dry heat into his junior career. He won the junior time trial at the UCI Road World Championships in 2016, a result that signaled he possessed the aerodynamic discipline elite teams covet. Rally Cycling signed him, and he cut his teeth on American roads, but the leap to WorldTour with UAE Team Emirates in 2020 placed him in an entirely different ecosystem. Suddenly, he was riding alongside Pogačar, perhaps the most prodigious stage racer of the modern era, and learning the trade of the super-domestique.
That role demands a peculiar selflessness. During the 2024 Tour de France, McNulty was often the last man standing between Pogačar and the general classification threats, setting a metronomic pace on Alpine ascents before peeling off, job done. He rarely sees his name in the headlines from those days, but teammates and directors recognize that without that steady diesel engine, the fireworks launched by the leader might fizzle. The physical toll is enormous, yet McNulty seems to digest it with a level-headedness that borders on stoic.
What separates McNulty from a pure climbing domestique is his time trial pedigree. In 2024, he won the individual time trial at the Tour of the Basque Country on a technically demanding course, and he claimed the opening prologue at the Tour de Romandie with a ride that blended raw power and aerodynamic finesse. Those results are not merely padding for his palmarès; they are proof that he belongs among the world’s best against the clock. At the Paris Olympics, his fifth-place finish in the individual time trial placed him within touching distance of the podium, behind only the discipline’s absolute elite. For a rider who often sacrifices his own chances for a team leader, these solo performances serve as a reminder: the engine is there whenever it is allowed to run uncoupled.
The tension between team duty and personal ambition is not unique to McNulty, but he navigates it without the public friction that derails some careers. In interviews, he speaks with an understated practicality, rarely complaining about the workload and framing his own opportunities as natural byproducts of the team’s strength. That adaptability has made him invaluable to UAE, a squad stacked with grand tour contenders like João Almeida and Juan Ayuso. While others might angle for leadership elsewhere, McNulty seems to understand that his blend of time trialing prowess, climbing ability, and recovery capacity can flourish precisely because he is not the focal point of the entire circus. The pressure is distributed, and when a window opens—a breakaway, a time trial, a week-long stage race without the top-tier captains—he is ready.
There is an intriguing question that hovers over his trajectory: could McNulty lead a grand tour team himself? At 26, he is entering the typical peak years for a stage racer. His climbing is robust, but at the highest altitude finishes he has occasionally conceded time to the purest lightweight climbers. His time trials, however, can take back chunks of seconds that pure grimpeurs lose. The arithmetic suggests he could target a top-ten finish in a Grand Tour, perhaps even scrape a podium with a favorable route and a dedicated team. Yet the sport’s economics are shifting, and the gap between the very best and the very good seems to be widening rather than narrowing. For now, McNulty’s greatest value—both to his team and to his own trophy cabinet—may lie in being the ultimate hybrid: a rider who can sacrifice himself on a mountaintop, then three days later win a chrono where nothing matters except the clock and the pain threshold.
In an age that worships the alpha leader, there is something quietly admirable about an athlete who masters the supporting role while still finding ways to win. McNulty has done that without fanfare, without flashy social media drama, and without demanding the spotlight. He represents a different kind of American cycling success story—one built not on dominating the Tour de France, but on excelling in the margins, on being the piece that makes a championship machine function. The next time you watch a grand tour stage and see a UAE jersey relentlessly drilling the front of the peloton, glance at the name. It might be McNulty, the quiet engine, doing exactly what he does best.