Logan Owen wasted little time shifting from cyclo-cross to road racing after his third-place finish Sunday at the USA Cycling Cyclo-cross National Championships in Asheville, North Carolina.
The next day the rider from the Pacific Northwest was on a plane for Southern California and the first camp with Axel Meckx’s Axeon Hagens Berman development team. From there Owen will travel across the Atlantic for the U23 men’s race at the UCI Cyclo-cross World Championships in Belgium on January 31.
It’s a busy schedule for the 20-year-old who last year won a stage of the Tour of Utah and followed that with three top-10 finishes at the USA Pro Challenge, including a fourth-place finish in Aspen. Now entering his third year with Merckx’s development program, Owen is hoping his efforts will pay off again this year with more success, and he’s targeting the early spring Nations Cup races that are the top of the pyramid for aspiring pros.
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“I’m going to go for some early season spring stuff, because those are the courses that suit me better than the American races, which other than Utah don’t really suit me too well because they have much longer climbs and all that,” Owen recently told Cyclingnews.
“The early spring races like Liege and Flanders, all those big ones, they’re always my big target,” he said. “Last year didn’t really go as planned when I got really sick. I almost didn’t race, but I got though it and kind of helped my teammates out last year.”
Owen finished eighth in the U23 Paris-Roubaix in 2014, but the illness last year in the U23 Tour of Flanders and Liege-Bastogne-Liege, where he finished 58th and 106th, respectively, put a dent in a his chances for success. He bounced back with a top-10 finish in the final stage of the Tour of California in May and two top-10s at the Tour de Beauce in June before storming into Utah and Colorado.
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