We woke up to a foggy morning here in Tabor. After breakfast, we rode down to the course, pre-rode it and began to make decisions on tires and pressure. I changed my mind about running the Challenge Grifos as the course became much slicker than yesterday when we pre rode the course. I ended up switching to the Limus tire. Then I did my warm up and headed over to the start/finish stretch to do the usual ride up and down the straight and run a little. I was 4th call up and my teammate, Curtis White, was 5th call up. We started the race and I was 4th into the first turn and Curtis was 2nd. A third of the way through the first lap the reigning Junior World Champion, Mathiue Van Der Poel, attacked and put a gap on everyone else. I immediately tried to get around the 2 guys in front of me and tried to bridge the gap. By the time we got to the top of the course, 3/4 of the lap, I closed the gap back down to 3 seconds with 10 riders in tow. When we hit the start/ finish stretch he had opened it back up to 13 seconds on Quinten Hermans of Belgium and I. So I swung off to let him pull. He ended up riding me off his wheel at the end of the 2nd lap as I couldn’t recover from chasing Van Der Poel. Less then 1/4 of a lap later a group of 4 passed me and I ended up yo yoing off the back of that group the rest of the race. I finally recovered enough to make contact again with that group with 400 meters left and was able to out sprint a Belgian and a Swiss kid for 5th place, only a bike length from getting on the podium. Curtis ended up finshing 29th after some bad luck. I was sort of happy with this result but realized that I am going to have to work even harder if I want to win Worlds in February. I would like to thank Tête de la Course Cycling, Redline Bicycles, Geoff Proctor, Michel and everyone at USA Cycling for making my road to Kentucky 2013 possible.

-Logan Owen