Defending US road race champion Greg Daniel (Trek-Segafredo) will line up on Sunday at the USA Cycling Pro Road Championships in Knoxville, Tennessee with the number 1 dossard on his back, but has brushed off any pressure to keep his stars-and-stripes jersey. After all, he`s riding around with a collarbone that is being held together by a bent piece of titanium. In 2016, Daniel stunned the US peloton by soloing away to claim the US Pro road race title in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The result kicked off a string of impressive rides that included two stage wins and the overall victory at Tour de Beauce, but a crash in the Tour of Utah lain August left him with a fractured collarbone that was fixed with a metal plate. He resumed training and racing six weeks later, and then made his WorldTour debut with Trek-Segafredo. A crash in Belgium earlier this year made it apparent that the bones beneath the plate had never stitched themselves together, and the crash both separated the two pieces of bone at the same fracture and bent the plate. He`s continued to train and race, however, not wanting to slow down long enough to have another surgery.ADVERTISEMENT `I`ll need to have surgery on it again to fix the bone and make sure it heals,` Daniel tells Cyclingnews from his home in Colorado. `I`m thinking of waiting until the end of the season - later in October - to get it fixed because I have a few races. I was thinking maybe to do it in July or August, but we have the Colorado Classic coming up; I`d like to do well there. It might not be a good idea to have surgery and then try to get back into shape right before Colorado. I`ll try to get it fixed later in the season.` He`s been assured by his surgeon that racing with the collarbone as is doesn`t pose any threat to his well-being, but he admits that psychologically it has made it difficult sometimes to fight for position - even if it isn`t painful while riding. `It`s not ideal, especially in my first season as a pr ...
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