[email protected] (Jackie Tyson)
2026-01-22 13:49:00
Megan Jastrab turns 24 in one week as she begins her sixth season as a professional rider on the WorldTour level. She soared to three world titles as junior in 2019, two on the road and one on the track, Omnium. So far, she has 29 US national titles as well.
After the last five seasons with Dutch squad Picnic PostNL and a solid haul of top 10s, Jastrab has just one UCI victory, a 1.1-level race at Tour de Gatineau from 2023. She makes a fresh start with UAE Team ADQ this season, summoning the line delivered by the good witch of the north, Glinda, in the Wizard of Oz movie when Dorothy didn’t know how to find her way home: “You’ve always had the power my dear, you just had to learn it yourself.”
“I’m naturally drawn to the Classics – they’re my favourite type of races. I also enjoy short stage races like the Tour of Britain and the Tour of Scandinavia, where the courses are similar to the Classics but spread across five days,” she said last fall after committing to UAE Team ADQ.
Clear pathways for juniors
Jastrab is an impressive multi-tasker away from race courses, completing a double major in marketing and exercise science at Milligan University in the US and serving as a rider council member of The Cyclists’ Alliance (TCA). She also started a coaching business with M2M Ride and organised the Megan Jastrab Bridged-Opportunities Fund to send four junior women to UCI Road World Championships in Rwanda.
It was that last project, a fundraiser to support the USA Cycling Development Foundation, which Jastrab will revamp as a scholarship programme for this year.
“For the scholarship, I plan to open it in March after the National Team is selected for the spring trip to Europe,” she told Cyclingnews.
In September last year, the WorldTour veteran raised $16,226 in her crowdfunding campaign, and added personal prize money from the season, which was split evenly among four young US women and fully fund their trips to Rwanda to compete in junior races.
Results weren’t the objective, but Lidia Cusack and Liliana Edwards finished top 20 in the road race and 13th and ninth, respectively, in the time trial. Alyssa Sarkisov was 10th and Alexis Jaramillo 40th in the junior road race.
“The extra donations will be put towards next year’s junior women trips with the national team to continue helping the next generation pursue their dreams,” she noted in the GoFundMe recap. She is now working out the details for a scholarship programme with the USA Cycling Development Foundation for more opportunities for US junior women.
Jastrab thinks it is important for junior riders to not just get experience on the world stage, but also be seen by others outside the US in order to get on radars for bigger teams.
“I think having a clear pathway for juniors in the US to getting opportunities to race in the pro women’s field, to get into Europe, and then just being seen, is what’s needed. Or, being able to see what opportunities are available to them to make it a career if they want that,” she said, going to to explain that young riders need mentors “to explain the visas, explaining housing, language barriers, anything like that, just to make it clear what’s needed”.
She gave a shout out to the National Interscholastic Cycling Association [NICA] for junior high and high school athletes in the US to gain biking skills and entries for racing, mainly for mountain bike. That is where she got her start.
“We have NICA, which is very successful. And I also raced at NICA, and it was incredible. I would show up to races and have 70 girls to race against, compared to 20 girls at Nationals for road. It’s a very big disconnect between those two,” she noted. “There needs to be teams for juniors to race on [beyond NICA].”
Is there a solution? The development system to offer juniors a path to WorldTour opportunities just wasn’t clear cut any longer. She thought new energy in the US could come through local solutions, like more road races for juniors. Starting small could lead to big things, but it would take money.
“You always want more – more women’s races live streamed, more teams, more staff. It always comes with a price tag. There’s not a lot of Continental-level teams that have enough funds, across the globe. It’s lacking in the US but also in Europe.
“So I think having opportunities, it comes down to grassroots, local level racing. We have criteriums, but there’s not that same number of race days where you can say, hey, I’m gonna go do this stage race. These races, they don’t have money to continue. So then you can’t say I want to develop as a rider if there’s no races to do. And teams can’t be around if there’s no races.
“I think it’s patience, but also really getting back to some of the basics, and not forgetting the grassroots racing, having those come back funded. Then teams will come, riders will come, and then sponsors will come.”
Change is possible she said, and she has seen positive changes for women in elite racing since she started with Rally UHC Cycling in 2019, where she won a stage at Valley of the Sun Stage Race and Redlands Bicycle Classic.
“Another issue is that people want women’s cycling to match the men’s cycling, and I would love for a lot of things to be more equal. But at the same time, the change is so vast from the five years since I started, like the races that are available to us, the prize money, the salaries, the working conditions – it’s improved so much.
“And I don’t think things can just change overnight. I think people need to support the change that’s happened and celebrate that in a sense.”
