Abstract : In heavy ion collisions, the high pT observables convey information about the initial conditions of the system under study. The suppression of high pT neutral pion and charged hadrons yields with respect to the nucleon-nucleon binary scaled p-p collisions and the particle composition in Au+Au collisions (as measured by the PHENIX experiment during the first two runs of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)) are briefly reviewed. Finally, the newest results from the RHIC Run 3 d+Au, which disentangle initial and final state effects, are presented.