Taylor Phinney’s return to competition at this week’s UCI Track World Championships was much heralded, and while neither he or the US Team Pursuit team managed to take home a medal, Phinney was rightly delighted with his performance in the Individual event held on Friday.

Phinney retired from the professional peloton prematurely in 2019, aged only 29 after a career in which he won 13 races, including a stage of the Giro d’Italia. But while he is perhaps best known as a road rider, he is no stranger to the track, and though the decision to return to international competition might have been a surprise, that he chose the velodrome as the location for that return was not.