Taylor Phinney talks substance abuse in the peloton, "in the classics, so many of the guys were doing that"

Taylor Phinney was one of the most prolific American time-trialists of the last decade, and a very popular rider within the peloton. He retired in 2019 after three years with the current EF Education - EasyPost team, and he's talked about substance use in the peloton in the years where he has ridden professionally among the best.

“There was a time when I was quite outspoken about finish bottles in races. 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," Phinney said in an interview on the Thereabouts podcast. The American rider retired in 2019 but has since remained vocal in the cycling space.

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“I don’t know if that has completely gone away but it was pretty widespread in my first couple of years that you would smash a couple of Tramadol at the end of the race... If I took one of those right now it would send me to the moon. I was never into that, I would get offered that but I was like I don’t think I need an opiate painkiller today to get through this race," he said. Then he went on to talk about the classics, where he reported that the practice was quite common in the peloton.

“But it was just a thing, especially in the Classics, so many of the guys were doing that. 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 was a fair amount of coincidentally timed cortisone injections being given to some people going into certain races. You don’t need it. If you need a cortisone injection you should be out for a while. Not like, I just got a cortisone injection and now I’m like, winning Flanders," he added.

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He talked about the use of cortisone in 2014, after having broken his leg in a crash at the American national championships which kept him out of competition for over year: “I had a cortisone injection eventually when I broke my leg and I was just flying and half of my leg didn’t work. I was like, OK, I think I understand this now. I spoke out about that and I received quite a bit of backlash from the management.”

Outside of that people were like ‘yay he’s speaking up’ against this or that. But within the group, there’s very much this ‘this is our secret, our world'," he said as a way to explain some of the mentality in the peloton.