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.
This piece is reportage on a series of podcasts Taylor Phinney did over the past several years:
PLAYLIST
Segment 1: Bobby Julich & Jens Voigt 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
In Part One, we introduced Phinney, and detailed his feelings about the business side of pro bike racing.
The addled mind of a top pro.
For everyone, the mental aspects of a job can be as, or more, important than the physical, even the physically demanding jobs. One needs to live with oneself, with the activities one has chosen to do and not to do, and be at least somewhat accepting of the choices made or foisted upon them.
There is something great and lucky about being a pro bike racer. Definitely being fast is, in, and of itself, a great feeling. Winning races can be a drug, a high that is awesome, even if short. Phinney talks about being incredibly lucky to be a pro bike racer and have had the experiences he’s had.
At the same time, he acknowledges that being a pro lead to an unbalanced life where a kind of worry is a constant. He told Life in the Peloton, “There’s a lifestyle that we are allowed to live as a professional athlete that is super, super lucky to have the amount of time that we have to be at home, to be traveling, to be seeing different places. And it’s really easy to get caught up in this idea that you’re not doing enough, that you’re not training enough, that you’re not racing as well as you possibly can.” And that leads to seeing aspects of life that aren’t racing, training, or recovery as wasted time, as something that is just time to kill.
This is something that seems like it should be typical, in a way. Most pro bike racers probably had structure in the form of other obligations from family and school when they were young, but that structure kind of disappears when one’s job is bike racing, and many transitioned from living with their parents to being a full-time racer without having to balance a life in between. It seemed like he didn’t know what to do with that time, which is something most people probably learn to work with in a way, but it might be easier if one’s first adult experiences are not elite bike racing. Still, to succeed at bike racing, it’s probably best to figure out what to do with the time that isn’t three things. And it is definitely important for a pro to figure it when they retire, because that time to kill now consumes all of one’s waking hours.
But that’s the easy stuff.
Empty room and a crisis of meaning.
In the Life in the Peloton podcast, Phinney talks about what seems to have been a pretty extreme mental crisis in the midst of what should have been the height of his racing year. During the 2016 spring classics, while he was on BMC, which had a highly-regarded team that was expected to do well, he found himself alone in his hotel room just crying and drawing skulls. He doesn’t say what got him to focus on meditation, but it’s lucky for him he chose that rather than using drugs, or gambling, or physical outbursts to blot out what he was feeling.
“I was by myself in Belgium during the classics. And, to be completely honest, like, super depressed and I was in this hotel room for, like, three weeks. And it was around this time it was around like it was in the build-up into Roubaix, but we were going, you know,… This year I was with BMC and it was a year that Greg (van Avermaet, the team leader) crashed in Flanders and broke his collarbone. And it was like someone had died, you know, like the vibe was like mortuary. And I’m just in my room, and I was in a solo room and I would, I was, just, like, crying and drawing. And, like, drawing a bunch of skulls everywhere and it was that that point really where I recognized like, okay, you have to just sit down and close your eyes and just do 15 minutes of meditation.
“That was just, like, taking an idea of what I thought meditation was, and then putting it into practice, which was basically, like, sit with your eyes closed and just deal with it.
“Because I couldn’t deal with it. I couldn’t deal with it. I couldn’t deal with sitting in silence.
“I always had to be stimulated in something. I think that’s a pretty universal feeling.”
From there, he details the place meditation has in his life and how it works for him. It’s impressive that he found a positive, constructive way to deal. At the same time, considering that elite bike racing is a stressful job with little job security, it would seem that teams, particularly at the WorldTour level, should be invested in the mental health of their athletes, so they can perform at the task they were hired for. And that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Later on, he discusses the emptiness of racing, particularly when it’s for a billionaire (the owner of BMC) who, in Phinney’s mind, just wanted the team so he can brag to his friends about it. And he found a certain amount of happiness riding for EF because they seemed to have a mission beyond selling stuff.
Nobody was happy to be there.
In The Adventure Stache, Phinney talks about being at races with his partner, Kasia Niewiadoma, compared to his own experiences at the dinner table with his teams. “Nobody was stoked to be there. If none of us are stoked to be here, why are we here? The women’s side seems more positive I would say, at least in Kasia’s little bubble. They’re a little more naturally driven. There seems to be more passion involved…there’s less money involved…with less money, there’s less ego, and everyone is more friendly. There’s not all this mind manipulation stuff going on.”
Again, the riders, the primary asset of the team, are unhappy or agitated or stressed to the point where it seems that they’re doing all they can to deal with the pressure they feel. And perhaps they are looking at teammates almost as frenemies, knowing that if one doesn’t do so well, they could lose their place to a teammate next season. And, while it might be easy to write it off as merely the cost of being an elite of whatever pursuit one is involved with, it seems to suggest that the elites don’t want what they have involved themselves in. But the responsibility of this state of affairs has more to do with the bosses, who themselves often came through the same system and are just continuing the only thing they know, maybe thinking they’ve improved it a little bit, perhaps grudgingly.
The bosses, however, are always aging out.
That’s where Phinney places a little hope, as he told McElveen.
“I think maybe, like, once all the old, once all of the old people who have been in control for a long time, maybe this is an unrealistic millennial dream, but like, if Patrick Lefevere didn’t exist, the sport would be better. There’s, like, people in the sport who are just making it this ‘alpha male prove yourself at all times’ kind of environment. There’s not enough job security to make people to feel comfortable enough or stable enough with their lives, so everybody feels like a bit under the thumb. And then what you’re reaching for is to please someone who is like, not to say all team managers are bad people, but it’s very much a business at the top, and it’s a business run by old rich white dudes, which sounds like the rest of the world.
“That’s why I say, maybe it’s, like, a millennial fantasy that will never happen, because it will keep getting passed on to the next generation. But I like to think that the people getting into sport now are maybe a little more, like, expressive, a little more sentimental, a little more passionate, but I could be completely wrong, because I’m kind of removed. It also seems like the opposite is happening, like people are, you know, people are learning how to calculate their power numbers by the age of 13. And then, they’re like super robotic before they get into the actual racing side of it. I don’t really know. It starts at the top, and it’s too big of a mountain, It’s a mountain I saw and I thought I didn’t want to climb this mountain.”
It’s a mountain he started climbing as a teenager. And one that probably had some warning signs along the way. Something he acknowledges he didn’t see when he was young, but, to be fair, not many kids can see it. Probably not too many adults, either.
He told Morton, “Of course, you don’t realize, like, at that age what all of that entails.
“And then you actually meet famous people and you realize that most of them are, like, really messed up and really kind of scary, and, like, unhappy, and then you go through your own process…I got to a point where I don’t need to have a million followers on instagram , I don’t need to do this whole thing, because it feels like I’m taking my soul and just giving it away to a bunch of different people who don’t care about it, and that’s going to make me act like a weird person, like, start to act like a sociopath. And that’s not what I want from my life.”
It seems that it slowly came into focus once he got himself to the top. There’s frustration he shares that he was hawking sponsor products that he doesn’t use or like, and that then people are buying the stuff based on insincere recommendations. But that one of many aspects of the business he didn’t like.
In his chat with McElveen, he relates, “The relationship with Lance (Armstrong) was my first taste of business, like what business relationships actually are. And that lead to a sour taste in my mouth. They say, ‘never meet your heroes,’ so I guess there were a couple of ‘never meet your heroes’ moments…I stepped away and saw that most of the world doesn’t care at all.”
Doping in bike racing
At the start I mentioned that my interest was in hearing Phinney dish on finishing bottles and Tramadol and the like. The discussion was in the Thereabouts interview with Morton, and pretty far in.
“There was a time when I was quite outspoken about ‘finish bottles’ in races, which are these concoctions, When I first started racing, the EPO and blood doping era was seemingly past, but there was still a huge amount of opiate abuse in the sport and, like, I don’t know if that has completely gone away but it was pretty, pretty widespread in my first couple years that you would just, like, smash a couple Tramadol, like, at the end of the race, which is basically like taking a Vicodin or two along with like a bunch of caffeine and maybe some Sudafed. And then, I mean, that’s a bomb right there. If I took one of those right now, it would send me to the moon. I was never into that. I would, you would get offered that, but I was like, ‘I don’t think that I’d need an opiate painkiller today to get through this race.’
“But it was just a thing. Like, especially in the classics, so many of the guys were doing that. So, I was kind of, like, ‘this is fucked up,’ so I said some stuff about it in an interview and then I also talked about how there’s was, like, a fair amount of, like, kind of strangely-timed or, like, coincidentally-timed cortisone injections that were given to some people, like, going into some races. And I was just, like, this is, this, you don’t need it. If you need a cortisone injection you should be out for a while. Not, like, ‘I got a cortisone injection and I’m winning Flanders. And, I actually got a cortisone injection after I broke my leg, and I was flying when half my leg didn’t work.
“So, I spoke out about that and I got quite a bit of backlash from the management.” Which was frustrating to him because part of his public persona was that of an outspoken person, and he thought it was part of his value to the team. And feeling that he needed to be silent as a condition of his employment doesn’t appear to be something he was ever comfortable with.
Amusingly, BMC management did create some rules seemingly just to contain him. Phinney relates that at the 2012 Giro, he was so excited to be a part of the race, he was tweeting congratulatory messages to every stage winner. Eventually, there was a team rule not to do it, though he was the only one doing it. He related that this happened for a bunch of things—he would have preferred just for them to directly address him.
The struggle to do better.
The idea of being a truth teller, speaking one’s mind, pointing out problems, bringing things to the attention of others and making things better is something that Phinney thought was baked into life. To be fair, media, and the public generally valorize such actvity. He felt the team not allowing him to speak out was a strange mix he couldn’t quite make sense of in that, when it came to riding and racing and visibility, the team gave the strong impression that he, as a rider was the most important person, that the team was built around enabling the riders to be prominent in public. But, when it came to speaking up, there were string-pullers a few layers above him, and he wasn’t at that level, and would never be as a rider.
Phinney’s struggle is kind of where this piece is going.
I’m sure some people will dismiss this as the complaints of someone too soft for the life he had chosen, someone who had it too easy, who didn’t appreciate what he’s been given. I disagree. Yes, the mental side is hugely important, and if someone doesn’t like it, they’re either not going to do well, or not going to last, or come out of it a damaged person; maybe all three. Phinney’s performance on the bike should seem like enough to justify his place in the pro peloton, regardless of how tough, how ready for the life he may seem. I’d hope that being a national and world champion and wearer of the maglia rosa as evidence that he was more than good enough–as someone like Paul Kimmage. Christophe Bassons, and Jorg Jaksche, all of whom were hit by criticism that they weren’t good enough, that it was merely the griping of people who couldn’t hack it.
The life of an elite athlete is hard. It’s uncertain. It can be very short. It’s rarely remunerative. Most, when they stop, do not have an easy transition to the next thing. There is often phyiscal damage. Mental damage is hard to determine, but the stories of those who haven’t been able to make the transition and/or moved on to more destructive addictions are sobering.
Spectators, fans, if they care about the sport, should be concerned about the athletes. Yes, there is a certain truth to Jerry Seinfeld’s quip that many people are ‘rooting for an outfit.’ But we do follow athletes on social media and read their interviews, and maybe try to get a selfie. For the athlete, it’s a mix of being an adult and kid at the same time–which engenders a certain amount of jealousy for both kids and adults. For most athletes, the time in life at which they must commit to sport, is one where they might not be ready for the commitment they’ve chosen, and are kind of in suspended animation.
It’s hard to know who needs this information the most. The casual fan probably doesn’t want to know how the sausage is made. The team officials probably want to either ignore it completely, or at least pretend to themselves they’re doing all they can to make it a bit better than it was in their time. Maybe some are. The up-and-coming athletes probably don’t want to hear it, as part of what drives them is a belief they’ll be different.
Listening to Phinney, it’s hard to think the structures of pro cycling are doing enough for their star attractions.
I continue to appreciate JRA; thank you for offering thoughtful and critical views of pro cycling. I guess exploitation of athletes or, at least, putting them under extraordinary pressure, will never end, as well as doping in one way or another.