No Medal Ride for Taylor Phinney as USA Team Pursuit Starts Road to LA 2028

Taylor Phinney’s return to the track ended short of the medal rounds Wednesday as Team USA finished seventh in the men’s team pursuit in the Shanghai UCI Track Cycling World Championships.

But all is not lost as the team opens a long, 18-month fight to earn one of eight qualifying spots for the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games.

Phinney, newly crowned U23 road world champion Ashlin Barry, Grant Koontz and Anders Johnson clocked 3:50.916 in the second leg of racing.

The Americans led early against France but lost their heat by 1.297 seconds, posting the seventh-fastest time among the eight teams.

France advanced to Thursday’s bronze-medal final against Great Britain. Denmark and Italy will race for gold.

The Americans squeezed into the first round with a qualifying time of 3:51.029, finishing seventh among 18 nations and 6.038 seconds behind defending champion Denmark.

They shaved just over a tenth of a second off that mark in their second ride, while France found nearly two seconds to advance.

Also Wednesday, Team USA’s women’s team pursuit — racing without heavy hitters like Chloé Dygert and Jennifer Valente — stopped the clock in ninth, and missed qualifying for the medal rounds on Thursday.

‘Feels like coming home’

Team USA and Phinney were hoping for more in one of the biggest American cycling’s biggest comeback stories this season.

For Phinney, a two-time individual pursuit world champion, Shanghai marked his first worlds since coming out of retirement to chase a spot at the home Olympics.

“This is my first race back. It feels good, it feels like coming home. It’s fun riding with the guys,” Phinney said before racing.

“We have a really strong team, but it’s a question mark coming into the race to understand where the other teams are at. If we can do a top 5, we’d be happy with that,” he said. “We will take it one round at a time”

The result fell short of that ambition and of the benchmark the American program set last year, when the squad was fourth in the 2025 worlds.

Team USA’s last worlds medals in team pursuit was bronze way back in 1995.

Phinney, 36, returns to a discipline that also looks radically different from when he raced in the 2008 Olympic Games in track.

“The technology has changed quite a lot, especially in team pursuit. If you look at my (body) position in the individual pursuit, it was completely wide open, and now everything is super closed,” he said. “I think the position is more extreme, but the power numbers, they’re not, like, so much different.”

The road to LA won’t be easy

Team USA’s men’s squad has a big mountain to climb to qualify for the Olympic Games.

While the women’s team pursuit won gold in Paris 2024, the men didn’t even field a team and has never won an Olympic medal in team pursuit.

Phinney and rising star Barry give the squad new hope, but it won’t be easy.

Only eight nations per gender will qualify for the LA28 for team pursuit and the road to Los Angeles started Wednesday. The points window runs from this week at the Shanghai worlds through April 2028.

Seventh at these worlds provides an early marker to build on, but it’s far from guaranteeing a spot in Los Angeles.

Team USA will need to keep scoring against the same deep field across the qualifying World Cups, Pan American championships, and next year’s track worlds.

The next qualifying event to watch is the World Cup series, which starts April 2-4, 2027, in Milton, Canada. That’s followed by Hong Kong on April 23-25 and another Chinese round from April 30 to May 2.

The 2027 world championships provide another major test, with the track competition scheduled for August 26-30 at Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines as part of the “super worlds” set for France next summer.

For Phinney and the Americans, the first race is in the books.

Now comes the hard part of competing against the confirmed power houses like Denmark, Great Britain, Australia, and Italy, and finish inside the top eight to punch their ticket to Los Angeles.