Taylor Phinney was once the future of American bike racing. Now that he’s out of the sport, he could well be pointing to what the future of elite bike racing could be. Hint: it includes the disappearing of Patrick Lefevere.
I should back up.
(This will go long, so I broke the story into two parts. Keep in mind this is a distillation of four plus hours of conversation.)
While I was watching The Last Rider, a comment about team doping by LeMond reminded me that there was a podcast floating around where Phinney dished on finishing bottles and grey areas of doping in the pro peloton. I resolved to find that podcast. Especially because the upcoming week was promising to be cold and icy enough that I’d have the indoor time to listen.
A few web searches didn’t reveal the answer. Turning to iTunes, I found several podcasts where Phinney was the interviewee. About the only way to figure it out seemed to be to put an ear to all of the podcasts until I came across what I was looking for. It was a deep dive I wasn’t prepared for, but accepted the mission regardless. Figured it would be like hearing a cyclist memoir.
PLAYLIST
Segment 1: Bobby Julich & Jens Voight Bobby and Jens interview March 5, 2021, 49:14
Segment 2: Mitch Docker Life in the Peloton interview April 10, 2019, 0:54:00
Segment 3: Angus Morton Thereabouts Outspoken interview December 01, 2022, 0:49:00
Segment 4: Payson McElveen Adventure Stache interview March 5, 2023, 1:38:32
I didn’t realize I had signed up for over four hours of Phinney talking.
For me, cyclist memoirs are what I guess is my equivalent of beach reading. Most are pretty shallow, with occasional, often couched, and sometimes accidental, insights. I found David Millar’s Racing Through The Dark mostly self-serving and -aggrandizing, which is an insight into him. But the most truthful thing he shared was dealing with Lance Armstrong in 2007; Armstrong was quite threatening, and it seems like Millar was genuinely frightened. Hours of Phinney would be more-or-less what I got from those memoirs, just a spoken-word version. Kind of like reading politician memoirs.
I was wrong.
While it wasn’t planned, the interviewers got younger with each successive pod. Bobby Julich and Jens Voight are about a generation older than Phinney. Docker, a colleague at the time, is slightly older. Morton, a contemporary and seeming friend from Boulder, Colorado. And McElveen is slightly younger. The first three felt each was peeling back successive layers, with the most incisive the Morton chat.
What I wasn’t expecting was an inside view of the WorldTour racers’ life, which, even as lived by someone who was an elite among the elite, does not seem good, one few would willingly live. Yes to racing fast, yes to riding one’s bike, yes to travel, but the rest, probably no.
In earlier eras of cycling, it seemed that many coaches and team directors preferred people with tough upbringings; it was allegedly because they weren’t afraid of hard work, but what might have been equally important is that, with no other options beside returning to a farm or dead-end job, they’d not only work hard, but they’d do what they were told and ‘whatever it takes’ (aka doping) to keep racing. And if they didn’t comply, back to the farm or factory, or whatever dead end life they came from. It’s a reason college kids might not have been seen as ideal, and still might not be seen as such (even though Sepp Kuss, among others, went to college). Yes, desperation does create certain incentives, but they are generally not good ones.
In case you don’t know him.
Growing up, Phinney was like lots of kids around the world. He imagined himself becoming a professional athlete, a famous professional athlete. What he probably didn’t think of, nor could account for at the time, was that he was better positioned than most to make such an outcome possible. Both his parents had once been top athletes; Connie Carpenter-Phinney and Davis Phinney, both Olympic medalists at the 1984 games (gold in the road race and bronze in the team time trial, respectively), and his dad went on to win two Tour de France stages.
Phinney said of himself that his narrative basically revolves around his crash at the 2014 USA Cycling Nationals. He started racing at 16, already on the top domestic junior squad in the US before he even pinned on a number, and was getting results right away. He went from being a Junior World Champion at 17 to riding the Olympics at 18, to winning the Individual Pursuit World Championship at 19. He won an Espoirs World Championship. He was the best American time trialist. He wore the Maglia Rosa in his first Giro. And more. But the literal break in the story occurred when he crashed hard at the 2014 USA Cycling Road Nationals, severely breaking his leg. It took more than a year go get back to a semblance of his old form, and then he returned with a Team Time Trial World Championship, another national championship, his third Olympics at the age of 26. From afar, it seemed like post-crash was just a blip in his career. But the crash changed him. It had given him time to find himself. He started to explore art. And while there still some impressive results, including an eighth place at the 2018 Paris-Roubaix, nine years after winning the Espoirs Paris-Roubaix, the desire wasn’t the same, and he retired at the end of the 2019 season, only 29 years of age, seemingly his prime as a bike racer.
Now, he’s pretty much out of the sport. He doesn’t depend on bike riding or racing or the bike industry for his income, so he’s also just about free from any entanglements, or pressure to sugarcoat or avoid uncomfortable topics. His one connection is that his partner, Kasia Niewiadoma, is a top racer, and the current gravel World Champion.
The reasons to tune in.
That outline wasn’t particularly interesting to me, save the finding himself as an adult, a process that is more seen as the province of one’s earlier adulthood. And I probably didn’t need the Bobby and Jens pod. What quickly became striking, and got me to listen carefully, is that he was open about what he didn’t like about the life of a pro bike racer. And a good portion of that dovetailed with both what I fear of the life and what people have told me about it. Pro cycling should do better by its most visible employees. Much better.
To add to the mix, Phinney is a guy who not only had what would seem like the best possible support team around him, but also had the results to merit the best treatment, the most care from the teams he was on. His parents weren’t only athletes, but top cyclists who initially scraped by, so they probably saw some of the dark side of the sport, and the way people got chewed up, spit out, and occasionally destroyed by the sport. They helped set him up with teams, coaches, sponsors. They saw the way for him to go to the Olympics at 18, though he jokes that losing his virginity and going to the Olympics were about equally important in his mind at the time. Phinney was a member of an early incarnation of Team Slipstream (aka Jonathan Vaughters’ ‘clean team’) as a junior. Next, he was probably a well-paid athlete from the age of 18, when he joined the Trek-Livestrong development team; he was a winner of the Espoirs Paris-Roubaix and seen as the future of the sport. He moved to greener pastures with the BMC WorldTour team, one of the top squads in the world, which was managed by his dad’s former director from the 7-Eleven days, Jim Ochowicz. Then back to the Slipstream/EF WorldTour team, a scrappier, but still top outfit, for the final years of his career. These teams all would have seemed to have a commitment in terms of finances and team resources to make sure Phinney was fit, healthy, in a good mental state, and far removed from shady characters.
The pretty girl at the bar.
Talking to Morton, he presents a sense of what it was like to be 20, or younger, and getting all the love and attention that a junior world champion should expect.
“I remember my contract negotiations, it’s a bit different within the professional cycling environment. You’re not dealing with brands directly. You’re dealing with teams representing companies, and so your choosing a team, but that team comes with 20 different brands that you almost inherit that you have to promote. It’s not like you choose.
“Yes, of course these teams will give you the whole world on a plate and you can have this and you can have that and you can have this and like ‘oh yeah that’s no problem’ like boom boom boom boom boom like big smile like ‘let’s, you know, have a glass of wine and celebrate’ and then it’s like ‘sign here now, like, sign this,’ and then once you sign that thing, like, everything is different and that should be obvious, you know, it’s obvious to me now, but it wasn’t obvious to me when I was a kid.
“When you’re a kid, and these brands are telling you they’re building you a custom bike because you’re a giant and ‘we’re going to this for you’ and ‘we’re going to do that for you’ and then at the end of the day, once you sign the contract, yes, the money comes into your bank account, but all of the other words that were used to sell you on your decision, I’d say 50% of them are actually manifest in reality. So, just keeping that in mind, that you are sort of like the pretty girl at the bar. And there’s just gonna be all these weird trickster dudes coming in. We’re not talking about American trickster dudes, like, there’s American trickster dudes, but there are Dutch trickster dudes, Swiss trickster dudes, like, internationale. They speak a convincing language that you don’t even understand, but you like it. I want people to be careful and recognize that it’s a game and all of the guys who are playing the game, all of these guys who own teams are talking to each other, they’re chatting with each other. You’re a pawn in this larger ego game that you’ll never understand unless you play that game yourself.”
How does this occur? Phinney came in at the top, had the results and the promise, and a family that should have been able to wise him up sufficiently before the dotted line was signed. Yet he seems to have been tossed into this world, barely an adult, after living what was probably a somewhat sheltered life, with weird grifters and hangers-on in the mix, and probably promises of results if he just tries some strange supplement and so on. The teams didn’t come through on many the promises they made. And if he experienced this deceit and shadiness, it’s hard not to wonder if those at the bottom have it as even as good as he did. 50% would seem high for them.
Even at the top of the sport, unseemly deals go on. Legendary sprinter Mark Cavendish, who looked like he was at the end of his career in October, 2020, got a lifeline from the Quick-Step team largely because he personally brought an extra sponsor on board. At the second-division Continental level, some riders are told they can secure their places on the team by personally landing a sponsor, which caused a ruckus in Italy, but seems to have never been fully documented.
But sleazy, deceitful business dealings are probably not as bad as the mental toll of the pro racer’s life. That’s for part 2.
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