Cycling legend Phinney's surgery successful

The first stage of surgery to help cycling great Davis Phinney in his battle with Parkinson's disease was successful Friday, the same day the International Cycling Union released rankings that confirmed Phinney's 17-year-old son, Taylor, is about to become a U.S. Olympian.

Surgeons at Stanford University Medical Center in Palo Alto, Calif., spent about 4½ hours embedding two wires in a section of Davis Phinney's brain, doing so without complication. Next week, they'll attach a pacemaker to those wires, and when that machine gets turned on later this month, doctors believe some of his Parkinson's symptoms will be immediately relieved.

"Everything went very well, very, very well," said Dr. Jaimie Henderson, the director of Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery at Stanford and Phinney's surgeon.

The 48-year-old Phinney, the husband of 1984 Olympic gold medalist Connie Carpenter-Phinney, could be out of the hospital as early as Saturday.

Around the same time that Davis Phinney went into surgery Friday morning, the UCI confirmed that Taylor Phinney is the third-ranked individual pursuit cyclist in the world, which means USA Cycling will nominate him to the U.S. Olympic team later this spring.

All Taylor Phinney needed for that Olympic nomination was to be ranked in the top five among those not already qualified for the individual pursuit in Beijing. He only began competing in the event six months ago, and is already the reigning national champion in that discipline.

"There's a lot going on for us right now," Connie Carpenter-Phinney said.

Davis Phinney is a former U.S. Olympic cyclist and the first American to win a stage of the Tour de France. He was diagnosed with Parkinson's in 2000, after exhibiting some symptoms of the progressive disease for several years.