Taylor Phinney (Trek/Livestrong) making up time on the downhill. (Image credit: Jon Devich)
While recovering at home after having his tonsils removed, Taylor Phinney is busy putting together his 2010 racing schedule. With his focus set to balance both his track and road commitments, he's planning to race a similar programme to this year, with a strong emphasis on the Under 23 Classics and the World Track Championships in Copenhagen.
"I had surgery last week and it went fine. I have some nice holes in my throat but the surgery will pay off in the future," he told Cyclingnews. Throughout my life I've been getting sick a lot. With my tonsils out I should get sick a lot less. When I think back to last year, I was getting sick after every big race that I did. Without that happening I should do a lot better next year."
With Lance Armstrong's Team Radioshack set to be announced as a co-sponsor of the Trek-Livestrong team, Phinney will also take part in a number of training camps with the RadioShack squad, before starting his first race of the season, at the Tour of Qatar. "I don't know my exact programme, but I'll be doing the Qatar and the Track World Championships in Copenhagen. I want to go there and win the pursuit again and prove to the UCI that they're making a mistake by taking it out of the Olympic programme," Phinney said.
At last week's track World Cup in Manchester, Great Britain's Geraint Thomas set the third fastest time in history for the pursuit. While Phinney believes that competition is good for the sport, he can go faster than the 4:15 that carried him to gold in Poland earlier in the year.
"I heard about Thomas, and I think that's great. He's fast and has been for a long time. I don't know why the British didn't enter a pursuit rider at the Worlds. I'm sure they had someone who could have gone fast. It was also good to see that Dominique Cornu is going faster than last year, even after a big road season. Manchester is known as being as fast track so it's too bad that I missed it. If you're fast enough you can make any track fast though. We'll see what happens in Copenhagen, but I want to go faster than I did in the Worlds this year."
From there Phinney will travel to Belgium to race with the American Under 23 Team at the Under 23 Tour of Flanders, Nations Cup and Paris Roubaix. "The main thing in May is going to be Paris Roubaix, so if I had a choice between that and Tour of California, I would do Roubaix. I won it last year, and if I went to the Tour of California I'd just get my butt kicked. I could go to Roubaix and maybe win."
One race Phinney won't be competing in again is the Vuelta Mexico Telex, where the Trek-Livestrong team made their debut in 2009. "We're not going back, which I'm relieved about. That was a long and hot race and came too early in the season, at least for me. The stages in Qatar will be short but fast."
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Daniel Benson was the Editor in Chief at Cyclingnews.com between 2008 and 2022. Based in the UK, he joined the Cyclingnews team in 2008 as the site's first UK-based Managing Editor. In that time, he reported on over a dozen editions of the Tour de France, several World Championships, the Tour Down Under, Spring Classics, and the London 2012 Olympic Games. With the help of the excellent editorial team, he ran the coverage on Cyclingnews and has interviewed leading figures in the sport including UCI Presidents and Tour de France winners.
