photo credits @ La Vuelta
Kaden Groves (Alpecin-Deceuninck) continued his winning ways, after the Australian rider claimed stage 5 of the Vuelta a España in Burriana today, making it his second consecutive victory in this year’s Spanish Grand Tour after he held-off a surging Filippo Ganna (Ineos Grenadiers) and Dries Van Gestel (TotalEnergies) to seize the day’s honors.
Meanwhile, Race leader Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-QuickStep) provided the only action in the GC standings, taking the intermediate bonus sprint to extend his overall advantage by six seconds. The Belgian rider now leads the Vuelta by 11 seconds ahead of Enric Mas (Movistar), with Lenny Martinez (Groupama-FDJ) still in third at 17 seconds.
Race Highlights
The stage was animated by a series of attacks from the likes of Sean Quinn (EF Education-EasyPost), Jarrad Drizners (Lotto-Dstny), Stefan Bissegger (EF Education-EasyPost) and Sean Flynn (dsm-firmenich), with Eric Fagundez (Burgos-BH) later becoming the lone escapee after 10 kilometers of racing.
From there, teams were happy to let the Uruguayan rider remain out front, letting his advantage swell to five minutes before slowly reeling him in over the next 100 kilometers.
Indeed, once Fagundez reached the only classified climb the day, the category 2 Collado de Ibola, his lead had dwindle to around a minute. Shortly thereafter, he caught and passed by Eduardo Sepulveda (Lotto Dstny).
With 41 kilometers to go, Fagundez was back in the peloton, followed by Sepulveda, who was reined in just a few kilometers later.
The next excitement came at the intermediate time bonus sprint with 11.2 kilometers to go, when race leader Evenepoel leapt away to take out the six-second bonus over Groves and Casper Pedersen (Soudal-QuickStep).
A crash at a roundabout inside 3 kilometers remaining, added to the nerves in the peloton, but Evenepoel stayed near the front with his Soudal-QuickStep team until the flamme rouge before sitting up.
From that point, Alpecin-QuickStep came to fore with a huge lead-out for Groves during the final 500 meters, with Ganna making a final surge to try and snatch the stage win.
However, Groves had enough turn of speed to fend-off his Italian rival.
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