Nate Brown moved from the Axel Merckx-led Bontrager Development team to Cannondale Garmin, one of the Jonathan Vaughters-led American Slipstream programs, in 2014 at the age of just 22.

During his six years at Slipstream, the Tennessee native played the role of consummate domestique and worker bee, helping his better-known teammates score wins around the world. Now, Brown will move to the U.S. professional continental team Rally UHC in 2020, where he will assume the role of road captain vacated by the season-ending retirement of Canadian rider Svein Taft.

Although only 28 years old, Brown's World Tour and European experience makes him well suited to mentor Rally's younger riders as they learn the ropes abroad.

"It's still weird for me," he told Cycling News at a team gathering in Minneapolis on Thursday.

"In my last year at 'EF Education First,' they started naming me road captain. Even though I was just a kid. But I was there for six years. I was the longest player on the team, aside from Alex Howes, who was the National Road Champion.

"So I shifted gears. Usually I was just a helper, doing my job, not opening my mouth, holding my nose. Now people are asking me, "What can I do here?"

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Brown met his new teammates earlier this fall at an informal gathering called Larry's low-key "blow camp."

"I like that because I feel like I really get to know everyone there. When you get to the actual camp, you already know everybody, so it's not like you're meeting everybody for the first time," he said.

In fact, Brown has raced against most of his new teammates before and has shared teams with several, including Bontrager's Gavin Mannion and junior Ty Magner.

"So I know a lot of them from way back, and it feels natural to come back to this world," he said.

Brown has worked as a laborer during his WorldTour tenure with Slipstream, but his desire to be on the winning torso at the end of the race has not diminished. Having had few opportunities with his former team, he was lured to Slipstream by the hope that he would get a chance at rallying.

"At EF I had one chance to run free on my own. So I'm not used to that kind of thing. They want me to mentor the young guys and actually race to win."

"I'm very excited. At the end of the day, we all got into cycling because we had the drive to win and we wanted to perform. I feel like I lost that for a while, so I'm excited to have that opportunity."

One of the first challenges Brown will have to overcome is making the mental transition from helper to leader to finisher. In other words, he needs to do his part for the others and stay focused on the race as a whole, rather than shutting things down at the end of the race to decide the winner.

"I think it takes a little time to get used to it. It's not just about doing my job and being done with it, I need to keep turning it on until the end of the race. Like I said, I've never done that before, so at first I'm like, 'No, I have to keep going. Especially if the team is behind me.

"Usually I'm like, 'Okay, I'm done. I've done my job. But now, if the team is working for me, I can't say mid-race, 'No, I'm not feeling well. I think it will take some getting used to, but once I get into the flow, I think I can get a couple of good results and rekindle my desire to win."

Brown's time with the Vaughters team was not entirely without personal glory; in 2017, Brown competed in his first and only Tour de France, winning the polka-dot climber's jersey on stage 3 for two days before Fabio Aru took it from him. He made the most of the opportunity.

"I grew up watching the Tour de France," he said. It was only two days in the KOM jersey, but I got to be on the podium. I'll always remember that."

Brown was allowed by the team to ride for himself, but all of his teammates did the same, including one who was already wearing the KOM jersey. This complicated things a bit.

"The day before, Taylor Phinney went into the break and took the jersey on stage one," said Brown. 'So I was free to go for the break on stage two. Finney said he really wanted to keep the jersey, so he was my first choice. But it took me a while to make the break. I decided to go with it and I was in it."

"I won the first KOM sprint, but lost the second. 'In the third KOM sprint it was down to me and one other rider. I was very nervous and I remember attacking with 1.5km to go to the line. I heard over the radio, 'Nate, you have 45 seconds left. You have 45 seconds left. But I said, 'No, I'm not going to relax until I cross the line. And I was still nervous that somehow I was going to lose it, but it worked out. But it worked out."

The jersey also earned Brown a surprise visit at the end of the Tour.

"I didn't have any family, but my father came to Paris. He's a Delta pilot, and somehow he got to go to Paris, so we flew to Paris, took a cab, came to the finish, and watched him finish. He's a Delta pilot. It was really cool."

But the coolest thing about his Tour adventure is that it gave him the motivation, inspiration, and confidence to move forward after a difficult year in 2016, when he said he felt lost and wondered why he was still racing bikes.

"The year before last, I didn't race since May. I basically just dug my grave in the spring and my body shut down and I didn't race for the rest of that year.

"So I was super motivated going into 2017, and one of my goals was to make the Tour de France team. And being able to compete in the Tour de France proved to me that I could do this, that I could do anything if I really put my mind to it. So since then, that's been my motivation, that if I put my mind to it, I can achieve it."

Brown hopes to take that motivation and the lessons learned in 2017 into the upcoming 2020 season, when he will have a new team and new opportunities.

"I have a goal and I'm going to really work on it, like, 'I really want to get this season. '

"When you're on a World Tour team and you're a small fish, you basically have to do what the team tells you to do, and I think that's what I'm going to do.

"I had to be ready for any race at any time. That's not a bad thing, but now I get one time frame when I really want to be good, and that's the goal, and now that I have that, I feel like I can really focus on something and it's going to be good.

Brown will get his first chance with Larry early next year at the Vuelta a San Juan in Argentina and the Tour Colombia 2.1.

"Next year the level will be even higher because it will be in Bogota," he said of the Colombian race, adding that the fans there rival the crowds at the Tour de France.

"In Medellín in particular, I would even say there were more spectators than many at the Tour de France.