Black shorts and long time in the hotseat: Samuel Watson wins Tour Down Under prologue for INEOS

Watson was one of the first riders to start in the prologue and immediately set a time of 4 minutes and 16 seconds. That put him straight onto the hotseat, which — in temperatures well above 30 degrees Celsius — proved to be quite literal. He stayed there for several hours, as it gradually became clear that no one would beat his time.

“There were quite a few guys who still made me nervous. Ethan Vernon finished right after me, just six hundredths of a second down, so I could just as easily never have sat on the hotseat,” Watson laughed on the podium. “When Jay Vine’s bar turned red, that was a huge relief. I’m so happy to start the season with a win.”

In addition to Watson’s win and Vine’s early time gain towards the general classification, the first day of the Tour Down Under was also about taking in the new team kits. Watson claimed victory in the new INEOS jersey, featuring the team’s familiar orange and the white of co-sponsor TotalEnergies.

The British rider chose to pair that jersey with black shorts, while several of his teammates were also seen in the much-discussed beige variant. With these colours, INEOS Grenadiers are clearly trying something different compared to recent years, when blue, black and red-orange tones dominated their look.