Enrico Battaglin sprints to stage 5 win – Giro d’Italia
Giro d’Italia 2018
Stage 5
Italy’s Enrico Battaglin zipped past compatriot Giovanni Visconti in a reduced bunch sprint in a frantic finale to Stage 5 as Australia’s Rohan Dennis retained the pink jersey ahead of Thursday’s showdown on Mount Etna.
Battaglin, the 28-year-old from LottoNL-Jumbo, followed up his third-place finish on Tuesday with a third career victory on the Giro to deny local rider Visconti a fairy-tale victory of his own.
In an enthralling conclusion to an otherwise quite sedate 153km stage along the south coast of Sicily, Battaglin and Bahrain Merida’s Visconti went head to head for the win as Portugal’s Jose Goncalves (Katusha-Alpecin) pipped the impressive German Max Schachmann (Quick-Step Floors) for third place.
Britain’s Simon Yates (Mitchelton-Scott) continued his fine form with a solid fifth place ahead of Stage 4 winner, the Belgian Tim Wellens of Lotto-Fix All.
A puzzling crash inside the final five kilometres saw Colombian GC hope Miguel Angel Lopez (Astana) lose more time at the finish, while Britain’s Chris Froome (Team Sky) struggled to keep up with his rivals on the decisive climb.
Despite finishing far back in the main pack, Froome was awarded the same time – although Lopez came home 43 seconds down to compound his miserable opening week on La Corsa Rosa.
Moments after the riders had rolled through the neutral zone alongside the famous Valley of the Temples near Agrigento, four riders broke clear right at the gun to form the day’s break.
Team-mates Ryan Mullen and Laurent Didier of Trek-Segafredo, Eugert Zhupa (Wilier-Triestina) and Andrea Vendrame (Androni Giocattoli-Sidermec) built up a maximum lead of over five minutes as the peloton rode the flatter opening half of the stage at a leisurely pace far slower than scheduled.
With three categorised climbs and the two intermediate sprints coming in the second-half of the stage, Wednesday’s activity was always going to be back-loaded to the business end of the race.
And so it proved. Irish national champion Mullen took maximum points over the first two Cat.4 climbs before being the first of the escapees to crack, 25km from the finish.
Didier and Zhupa soon followed suit after Vendrame attacked on the final categorised climb of the day, which he crested with one minute to play with over the nervous peloton.
With 14km remaining, a pile-up in the middle of the pack caught out numerous riders including Domenico Pozzovivo (Bahrain Merida) and that man Schachmann, the Quick-Step tyro sporting the race’s white jersey.
Both Pozzovivo and Schachmann not only managed to fight back into the pack but played significant roles in the finale – but not before the beleaguered Colombian Lopez skidded off the road into a grassy ditch with 5km remaining.
By then the race was well and truly on as the Lotto-Fix All and Mitchelton-Scott team-mates of Wellens and Yates set a fast tempo on the front of the pack as the race approached Santa Ninfa, the site of a terrible earthquake in 1968.
As Vendrame was swallowed up by the pack, Lopez was being paced back by his Astana team-mates Luis Leon Sanchez and Alexey Lutsenko – two riders who, on another day, would have been perfectly suited to the challenging finale.
In their absence it was Wellens who looked to be running the show, the in-form Belgian sniffing out a second-successive win on the steep ramp preceding the finish.
But when local lad Visconti powered through, Battaglin darted onto his wheel before benefitting from a superior kick once the road flattened out ahead of the line.
Battaglin’s victory – a third for the host nation – also makes it a personal hat-trick for the versatile LottoNL-Jumbo rider following previous wins at Serra San Bruno in 2013 and Oropa in 2014.
“For me the Giro is always the target for me. I always race well here and I’m really happy to get the win and continue in this way,” said Battaglin, three of whose four wins as a professional have come on his home Grand Tour.
“We’re only on the fifth stage but I already have a third and a first. I’ll now take the rest of the race day by day,” he added.
In Battaglin’s wake, Pozzovivo capped his own fightback with an impressive ninth place while race leader Dennis finished right alongside his rivals Estaban Chaves (Mitchelton-Scott) and Tom Dumoulin (Team Sunweb).
Froome came home much further back alongside team-mate Sergio Henao but in the same time as his rivals, the four-time Tour de France winner staying 55 seconds shy of Dennis on GC.
“Today was quite simple compared to yesterday and we’re looking forward to tomorrow which will be a big test,” said BMC’s Dennis, who leads defending champion Dumoulin by one second, Yates by 17 seconds and Wellens by 19 seconds.
Thursday’s 164km Stage 6 concludes with the first summit finish of the 101st edition of the Giro – a gruelling Cat.1 ascent of Mount Etna which should see the race blow apart and produce a seismic shift in the overall standings.
