BOX HILL, England —The Tour de France vs. the tour of Boulder County. Cycling around the sharp peaks of the Alps and Pyrenees vs. the altitude of the Rocky Mountains. Media scrutiny and fame vs. anonymity and solitude.
Boulder’s Taylor Phinney is about to test his theory on spending 6½ solid weeks training for one Olympic race. Ever since USA Cycling named the 22-year-old as America’s lone male road time trialist, Phinney has trained a program specifically designed to attack the 26.4-mile course. The race is Wednesday, beginning at 5:30 a.m. MDT and ending at about 11:25 a.m.
A major competitor is Bradley Wiggins, Great Britain’s first Tour de France winner. He could pull off the first Tour-Olympics double in history. But how much does he have left? How race-rusty is Phinney? We’re about to learn.
“When I got that nod for the time trial, I felt I really had a special opportunity to stay in Boulder, stay at home and really focus on the speed and the power output that I felt I needed to hold in order to win an Olympic medal,” Phinney said at the U.S. road cycling team’s base here in rural Surrey County. “And Boulder’s a perfect place to do that.”
Phinney’s theory is this: Why beat up your body and risk injury in European stage races when you can specifically design a training course similar to the one in the Olympics?
Also, Phinney is a time trial specialist. He claimed the 2010 national championship and won the opening prologue of the Giro d’Italia in May.
This is his first Olympics in road racing, but he took seventh in the 4,000-meter pursuit on the track in Beijing. Sure, the pursuit is four minutes and the time trial is more than 50. But the thigh-shredding agony is the same.
“Training for a time trial is very similar to training for a track race, which is something I’m pretty adept at,” Phinney said. “I’ve done that a lot.”
In training for the time trial, he laid a grid similar to the one in London. It begins at Hampton Court Palace, the royal residence in southwest London, then goes through suburban Kingston-upon-Thames and Surrey before finishing at the start.
While Boulder County has very few castles, it’s long on similar terrain. Phinney cycled an exact 26.4-mile square between Erie and Frederick along the Interstate 25 frontage road. And he rode it every Wednesday to simulate Wednesday’s time trial.
“Of course, the road surface is different, but in a time trial, a lot is in your head and being able to suffer,” he said. “It’s just being able to push through any physical boundaries for a solid 50 minutes and sit in a very uncomfortable place for that amount of time.”
His gains were huge. When he first started the program, he could handle only one or two miles at the same prescribed speed needed in an Olympic time trial. Over the next three or four weeks, however, he upped that steady wattage to 12 miles at upward of 32 mph.
“That’s something I could not have done if I’d done a race,” Phinney said. “If I raced, I would’ve come here with a solid base of fitness but not necessarily the specific work that I felt I needed to achieve what I want to achieve here in the time trial.”
Sports Illustrated’s projected medalists are Switzerland’s defending champion Fabian Cancellara, Wiggins and Germany’s Tony Martin, last year’s world champion. (Cancellara will compete, it was announced Monday, despite a crash in Saturday’s road race during which he injured his right hand.) Martin pulled from the road race, in which Phinney finished fourth, because of pain from a fractured wrist suffered in the Tour de France. Australian star Cadel Evans is still recovering from an illness that ruined his chances of defending his Tour title.
Phinney is among the dark horses, along with Spanish time trial champion Luis Leon Sanchez.
“For the time trial, race miles aren’t necessarily that important (nor is) racing with a group,” teammate Timmy Duggan said. “It’s the specificity training he’s been doing to the course. I know he’s been nailing that. With his big gap in racing, I really can’t imagine anyone in the field will have been training so specifically for the time trial as Taylor.”
John Henderson: 303-954-1299, jhenderson@denverpost.com or twitter.com/johnhendersondp
