The Tour of Japan starts with a 3-km prologue in the streets of Fuji. Some GC riders could make use of their good timetrialing skills to win some time over other favourites, though any gains of today could be turned around in the hilly/mountain stages later on the race
The first competitive time is Postlberger’s, doing a 4’24, 6 seconds faster than Young and Tleubayev. Siskevicius, as a minor GC contender, lost 21 seconds
Good times later for Porte (+3), Rolland (+6), while another GC rider in Squire loses 16 seconds
Some time passed without any great time, until Rajapakshage did a time just 1 seconds slower than Postlberger
Other interesting were Peterson (+5), Ratiy (+6), Mikhailov (+7), Ortega (+8) Tvetcov (+11), Roche (+12), Zoidl (+14), Lopez (+14), Ji (+14), Nazaret (+18)
New best time for Ian Stannard, one second faster than Postlberger
But it wouldn’t last long, as Japanese TT champion, Kuboki, would make a time of 4’20, 2 seconds faster than the British rider
Ganna (+4), Kreuziger (+5), De Luna (+8), Lipongyu (+8), Meier (+9), Konovalovas (+10), Poljanski (+17), Kinoshita (+18), Moazemi (+19)
Great time for Dees, only beated by Kuboki so far, 1 second behind him
Mygind does the fourth best time for Festina, but inmediately after, Cornu sets the fastest time despite setting same time as Kuboki
Last rider to start would be Monsalve, who loses 13 seconds to Chavanne (same time as Denifl, last years GC winner)
So stage win and race lead for Gabriel Chavanne, who is having a really great season, with several prologue wins already. No big gaps between GC favourites, with Kwiatkowski as expected the best of them
For some reason i'm not aware, and i just discovered when posting this, the export file of S1 is the same as S2. Luckily i put in the report the times of all importants riders in the race, so while there are no exports, you all know what time most riders did
