'Regardless of whether I make the official team for LA28 or not, I’m honored to be in the running' - Taylor Phinney is back and aiming for Olympic gold
American track, gravel and road cyclist Taylor Phinney has announced his return to racing, seven years after retiring from the sport.
The 2009 individual pursuit track world champion is returning to the discipline, aiming for a spot on the US pursuit team ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
"What started as a return to gravel racing has delicately snowballed into a full on Olympic dream," Phinney wrote on Instagram on Tuesday.
"The track was where I first found love and success in this sport, it was even the first discipline to break my heart when my specialty event, the individual pursuit, was removed from the Olympic program, which prompted me to swiftly abandon the track and go all in on the road," the post continued.
Phinney’s transition to the road had resulted in both triumph and catastrophe. At the 2012 Giro d'Italia, he became the third American to wear the maglia rosa after winning the opening TT stage. A trio of US national TT titles soon followed, but his promising charge was temporarily curtailed by a crash at the 2014 US national championships. There he sustained two breaks in the lower left leg and a knee injury after crashing into a guardrail.
After a dominant year, winning the Tour of Dubai and collecting a stage victory in the Tour of California and the US time trial, he was taken out of the Tour de France squad and into a year of rehabilitation. His official retirement announcement came five years later, when he was just 29: "I feel like my body sort of made this choice for me," he said at the time. "I've now been injured longer than I've not been injured as a professional athlete."
Phinney’s latest comeback began back in November, when training for the team first began. Pushed by his Tour de France Femmes-winning wife, Kasia Niewiadoma, and by his own family’s Olympic legacy. The last time the Olympic Games were held in LA was in 1984, when his mother, Connie Carpenter-Phinney, won gold in the road race. "The seed started to grow and before I knew it all I could think of was closing this final loop in my cycling career," he wrote.
While the transition back into a team environment has been smooth so far, the 35-year-old admitted that he’s got a lot of hard work in the gym ahead of him.
"Regardless of whether I make the official team for LA28 or not, I’m honored to be in the running and will look forward to making some World Cup teams to elevate the team to its highest potential and Olympic qualifying position!"
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