Two weeks ago, Owen Clark was exactly where he wanted to be.
The XC rider from King City, Ont., had just wrapped up his final year in under-23 with what he calls “an amazing season.” Racing for Pivot Cycles-OTE and carded with Cycling Canada, he pieced together his most consistent World Cup campaign yet.
His year started strong with a run of top-10s in the U23 men’s XCO World Cups, including 10th at the opener, sixth at round two, then 10th and 11th at rounds four and five. Late in the season he pushed even closer to the podium, taking fourth in XCO at Lake Placid and 13th in XCO at Mont-Sainte-Anne.
It was the kind of steady progression he has been building for years. Back in April he told me, “each year you learn a bit more. Especially at the world cups. It’s a different style of racing. It’s chaotic. You go from racing one or two guys in a Canada Cup to racing ten or more at once.”
By the end of 2025 he had proved he belonged in that chaos. He took sixth place at the Canadian Championships in XCO.
“Absolutely,” he said in the spring when I asked if going pro was the goal. “That’s the dream.”
Then a normal training ride in North Carolina changed everything.
A familiar road, a motorist he never saw
Clark is finishing his media and business degree at Brevard College in North Carolina, a school known for its cycling program. The crash happened there, on a road loop he has ridden “a million times.”
“It’s a normal training ride. It’s a straight section of road,” he says. “I was going like 42 kmph, I was going pretty quick. The road was kind of a false flat downhill.”
There was a car sitting patiently behind him, waiting for traffic to clear. Behind that car, an older driver in his 70s.
“The car directly behind me made this pass as normal cars would and just crossed over into the left lane and went around me,” Clark says. “The car behind that car just maybe accelerated forward straight. He didn’t realize I was there until the last minute and ran into me.”
Clark never saw it coming.
“I’m just riding and then all of a sudden I am bucked like I’m on a horse or something. I go kind of flying into the road,” he says. “I didn’t even see the car, because he was behind me.”
The impact launched him onto the hood. His bike went underneath.
“He said that I went up on his hood,” Clark says. “I got some really gnarly road rash on my butt and side up to my shoulder, so I think I just like…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Canadian Cycling Magazine…