February 18, 2007 - San Francisco - Team Slipstream powered by Chipotle got off to a fast and newsworthy start in Sunday’s Prologue event at the Tour of California, making two podium appearances. Rookie Jason Donald (Winter Park, CO) claimed the 2nd spot on the Overall classification, and young teammate Taylor Tolleson (Watsonville, CA) took home top honors in the Best Young Rider classification.

The prologue serves as the typical short, opening time trial of major stage races - yesterday’s course was a 1.9 mile route from San Francisco’s Embarcadero Center to Coit Tower on top of Telegraph Hill, which featured sharp turns and three steep pitches. According to prologue rules and tradition, teams send off their most inexperienced or poorest time trialists early in the event, and their time trial specialists later in the event; the last group of riders to go out on course are the preceding year’s top finishers.

So, when Team Slipstream’s first-year pro Jason Donald took off from the start gate as the seventh rider on the day, not many in the cycling world were expecting much, or much less knew who this tall, lanky kid from Colorado was. After setting the early benchmark, Donald sat on the hot seat for over two hours, in fact not until the day’s final starter, defending Prologue winner Levi Leipheimer, did he get bumped out of the lead. Leipheimer clocked in one second faster than Donald to repeat as winner.

In addition to Donald’s breakthrough result, California native Taylor Tolleson put in a great effort, finishing with the fastest time of any Under-23 age group rider - good enough for 19th place overall. Teammate Tom Peterson (North Bend, WA), who won the Best Young Rider classification at the 2006 Tour of CA, also had a good prologue, finishing in 2nd place in the Young Rider category.

Jason Donald’s impressive result, and Team Slipstream’s pioneering medical monitoring program were mentioned in today’s New York Times race report:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/19/sports/othersports/19cycling.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Cyclingnews.com has a great feature up today on Jason Donald:
http://www.cyclingnews.com/road/2007/feb07/california07/?id=features/donald