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Junior World Champion Quinn Simmons has opted to give up Christmas in the United States and train at home for his World Tour debut with Trek-Segafredo.

Simmons, 18, will spend the holidays with his father in Majorca and will spend the month of January there before making his pro debut at the Challenge Mallorca at the end of the month. He will then move to Oudenaarde, Belgium, for the Spring Classics, where he will continue to fast-track his professional career, moving up from junior world champion to World Tour neo-pro.

"It will be tough, but it will be worth it. It doesn't make sense to cut back on training days and go back to the US and come back in the New Year when you've been given the chance to step up to the World Tour level," Simmons told Cycling News at Trek Segafredo's training camp in Sicily.

"The pros are at a higher level, so you have to be fully committed: Mallorca in January, and then Oudenaarde before the season opener."

Simmons has already changed from the junior world champion rainbow jersey he won in Yorkshire to a fluorescent Trek-Segafredo training kit.

"It may be the last thing I wear in training, but starting January 1 I have to earn my spot in the peloton as a World Tour Neo Pro, not as Junior World Champion.

"This time last year I was doing intervals and dreaming of a world title and a world tour. The Trek-Segafredo riders and the rest of the peloton were my idols. Soon I will start racing with them and have to prove that I belong here."

Simmons' 30km solo run at the UCI Road World Championships Junior Road Race in Yorkshire was similar to Lemko Evenpoel's victory 12 months earlier, when he attacked where he had planned and declared to his friends with 30km to go that he was racing on his own felt like he was running his own race.

The similarity to the precocious Belgian was underscored after the race when it was announced that he would be skipping the U23 and going straight to the World Tour with Trek-Segafredo.

He missed out on the U23 season, just as many American ball prodigy athletes do not go on to college. Greg LeMond, who also turned pro in Europe at a young age, applauded the decision.

"I'm not a big fan of American sports, but I think Kobe and LeBron did the same thing in the NBA, and they did pretty well," Simmons noted.

"Peter Sagan did something similar and won a stage at the Tour of California when he was younger. As Greg Lemon said, if you are physically ready and mentally willing to go out there, there is no reason to wait. Sitting at home and waiting two years to do 40 days of low-level racing is dangerous."

"I know it sounds cocky, but I accomplished everything I wanted in junior, and I think that's a better scenario than being under 23 and winning races all the time. The guys at Trek-Segafredo are my mentors and it's a very good class room."

Simmons showed his great ability and physical maturity by winning the junior Gent-Wevelgem. He then went on to win more than 10 races in Europe, each one more powerful than the last.

"Physically, there is not much difference between me and the average professional. Anyone who rides a bike a lot can ride hard for six hours," Simmons suggests.

"The real difference is that you have to relearn everything: tactics, positioning, how to read the finale of a big race, etc. 250 km is a distance where you can make mistakes, so if you start learning now and start studying the roads of Flanders and Roubaix, in your second or third year you will already have a big advantage over your age group I believe that in the second or third year I will already have a big advantage over the riders of my age group."