The Giro d’Italia almost descended into farce in the finale on stage 5, as two breakaway riders emerged to fight it out but took turns to throw it away.
Two crashes and one wrong turn later, we had a winner in one of the most ridiculous conclusions we’ve seen to a Grand Tour stage in recent memory.
Igor Arrieta (UAE Team Emirates) made two mistakes to the one of Afonso Eulálio (Bahrain Victorious), but he somehow emerged as the stage winner, even if Eulálio had the consolation of taking the pink jersey.
Arrieta was leading down a descent and going at such a rate that he had gapped Eulálio, when he suddenly slid out and crashed. He’d just come through a right-hand bend that immediately swung back into a left-hand hairpin, and his bike slid out from underneath him.
However, with 6.5km to go, Eulálio did almost exactly the same thing. Leading the way, he was negotiating a gentle left-hand downhill bend when his front wheel gave way on the slippery surface. He fell heavily on his left side and went sliding a long way until being stopped by a guardrail.
Like Arrieta, Eulálio fumbled with his dropped chain before quickly getting a new bike from his team car. They grappled over who was setting it down on the road before he got back underway, shaking his left arm out in the process.
And yet, there was even more drama when, with just over 2km to go, Arrieta took a wrong turn. Eulálio was leading through a gentle right-hand bend that tightened as the road forked. He snuck onto the right road, but Arrieta, unable to correct his line, went sailing wide and into the tape that was cordoning off the wrong road.
Once again, it looked like it was stage over. Until suddenly it wasn’t. Arrieta clawed back the gap to Eulálio all the way to the line, reeling him in bit by bit in the home straight in a nail-biting and…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at CyclingNews RSS Feed…