Business as usual for Brownlee brothers as they secure top two

Alistair suffered an Achilles injury in February which had forced him to miss a number of races with yesterday’s event being his first at elite level since winning his second world title in China in September.

The 24-year-old, from Leeds, had feared his chances of competing at the Olympics in London had been scuppered by the injury but he reasserted his claim to be the gold medal favourite.

Alistair was four seconds adrift of the lead and two behind Jonny after the swim but he soon made that time up and although there was little to choose between the pair, the former produced the only sub 30-minute run and ultimately won comfortably in one hour 50 minutes 13 seconds for his third victory in Kitzbuhel in four years.

Jonny was second in 1hr 51mins 02secs, 16 seconds ahead of Javier Gomez of Spain, while David McNamee was ninth and Aaron Harris 18th.

For Alistair it was a welcome return to action and an indication of where he stands ahead of London 2012.

He said: “I didn’t really know what my form would be like. I know I’ve trained really hard for the last couple of months and I’ve been really tired the last couple of days, so it was about whether I was going to recover from that in time or not.

“To go that quick, I couldn’t ask much more.

“I didn’t know what happened, we had 17 seconds and then we had 30 seconds but someone did a good job to get us back as I thought we were going pretty well.

“There was a bit of uncertainty but it was about getting out there and seeing how it worked.”

He added: “Races never go how you plan, I never have a plan these days. Obviously we tried to push the early part of the bike as much as we could and see what happened, we couldn’t get away but I think it was important we hurt a lot of people’s legs as well.

“It’s nice to be back on the podium, and it’s fantastic to go a one-two, that’s what we always try to get.”

Jonny, meanwhile, admitted the whole field had been affected by their push on the bike, saying: “It was a really hard start to the bike.

“After we got caught, I thought it was over, that’s it but I think it hurt everyone else too to catch.

“It’s the way we race, we get on the bike and ride hard. Alistair just got on the run and killed everyone.

“Having Alistair back is like having things back to normal.”