Prologue at Tour Down Under brings smiles for INEOS Grenadiers, Zijlaard comes up short

As evening fell in Adelaide in sunny, warm Australia, we awoke after a night of frost in the Netherlands. The riders in Australia worked up a sweat in just a few minutes, with a prologue that returned to the race route for the first time since 2023. Back then, Alberto Bettiol was convincingly the fastest over a 5.5-kilometer course. The gaps on Tuesday would be smaller.

The first top time came within the first hour of the prologue. Watson blasted in his regular INEOS kit to a time of 4 minutes 16 seconds, averaging 50.7 kilometers per hour over 3.6 kilometers. Potential general classification riders like Finn Fisher-Black, Laurence Pithie (both Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe), and Marco Brenner (Tudor) struggled to match that time.

In the second part of the prologue, dangerous names came to the start, but each failed to reach Watson’s time. Pierre Gautherat (Decathlon) and Mauro Schmid (Jayco AlUla) did manage to place themselves in the provisional top five, but still at a respectable distance from the fastest time. Zijlaard rode fairly late and was about four seconds slower than Watson.

In the last half hour, it was mainly a case of watching two men. Matthew Brennan, starting for Visma | Lease a Bike, blasted off like a comet but gradually lost time on Watson. We also kept an eye on Jay Vine for UAE Team Emirates as the last starter. He ultimately placed fourth, also four seconds behind Watson, who gets to call himself the first leader of the Tour Down Under.