The highly-anticipated return of 2010 pursuit world champion Taylor Phinney to international competition at the UCI Track World Championships as the starter for Team USA's men's team pursuit squad ended on day 1, the quartet missing the medal finals. It's a step backward for the team, who finished fourth in last year's championships in Santiago, Chile.
Phinney made a late decision to join the USA Cycling programme, announcing his return in April, more than six years after he quit professional cycling at age 29 in 2019. His aim was to make the team for the Los Angeles Olympic Games to emulate his parents Davis Phinney and Connie Carpenter-Phinney, who both earned medals at the last Olympics there in 1984.
"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 programme, which prompted me to swiftly abandon the track and go all in on the road," Phinney wrote in April.
"Recently, the USA boys have been making huge strides in the Team Pursuit, and I couldn't be more stoked to be joining them in the chase for the Olympic Dream."
Phinney joined Ashlin Barry, Grant Koontz and Anders Johnson for the Team Pursuit on Wednesday, stepping in for last year's team member Graeme Frislie, who will compete in the Omnium, Madison and Scratch Race.
Speaking to the UCI on Wednesday before racing started in the Shanghai Velodrome on Chongming Island, Phinney said being back at the highest level on the track "feels like coming home in a lot of ways".
"It's really fun to ride with the guys," he said. "The technology has changed quite a lot, especially in team pursuiting.
"The positions have changed a lot. If you look at my position in the individual pursuit from 2009 - it was like completely wide open, and now everything is super close. So I think the position is more extreme, but the power numbers, they are not like so much different.
"I'm also racing as the starter, so I take a lot of the first minute of the race, getting everybody up to speed. I mean, we have a really strong team. It's kind of a question mark coming into the race, trying to understand where the other teams are at."
Phinney was realistic about the team's chances, saying before the race: "If we could do a top five, I think we would be really happy with that. And if we go into the finals, then we are more than stoked. But we'll take it one every one round at a time."
While the team did enough in the qualifying round to move on to the next heat, which determined the teams for the medal finals, they were unable to advance, setting times two seconds slower than the team did in 2025 and missing the medal round by half a second.
Italy and Denmark will face off for the gold and silver medals on Thursday, while Great Britain and France will compete for the bronze medal.
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