BOULDER — David Zabriskie pulled his name from Olympic consideration due to a conflict with the Tour de France, said Taylor Phinney, who that Zabriskie also coveted.
Phinney, 22, said at a Boulder press gathering Wednesday that he talked with Zabriskie while they took part in a mini-training camp with Christian Vande Velde, a former Boulder resident and current Zabriskie teammate with Boulder-based Team Garmin-Barracuda.
The Olympic time trial is only 10 days after the three-week stage race ends in France. Zabriskie would have also been in the Olympic road race six days after the finale in Paris.
“He felt really conflicted,” Phinney said. “He had to go to the Tour de France and knew he couldn’t specifically train for the time trial like I could. He knew I had an opportunity this year to really focus on the time trial where he had a diffeent couple goals in the months of July and August.”
Zabriskie and Vande Velde were two of four former Lance Armstrong teammates who pulled themselves from Olympics consideration before the U.S. team was selected Friday.
The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency had sent a letter to Armstrong, a seven-time winner of the Tour de France, that it had about 10 former teammates who would testify that he took performance-enhancing drugs.
It is not know if Phinney or Zabriskie are among that group. Phinney said Zabriskie mentioned nothing about that.
“Vande Velde never said anything about it, either,” Phinney said. “There’s people who are going to connect the dots and there’s going to be people who will just keep the thing separate. I never connected any dots. I just understood that there are people who are pretty happy about the way the team turned out anyways.”
John Henderson: 303-954-1299, twitter.com/johnhendersonDP or jhenderson@denverpost.com.
