But it wasn’t Marcel Kittel.
Greipel wins! Take that, pedals!
Andre Greipel’s ‘thing’ is being a big, muscular, pedal-mashing ball of angry, gaping-mouthed power. It therefore seems somewhat counterintuitive that he should win stage five of the Giro through his climbing.
But that’s essentially what he did. Over 233km of undulating roads, Greipel endured. When the pace picked up in the closing kilometres, he had enough left in the tank that he could stay in the peloton. Kittel couldn’t. From then on, it was simply a matter of winning a gently-rising uphill sprint.
Moral of the story: if you want to beat Marcel Kittel, try and engineer a way of not racing him.
Stage six
A proper uphill finish. Not steep, but long (17km) and hard enough that we should hopefully be down to the overall contenders and a few assorted hangers-on by the finish.
There’s no culinary update for this stage, I’m afraid, but I can inform you that at one point the peloton will go past a museum of fly fishing. Speaking as someone who grew up in a town boasting a salt museum, a museum of fly fishing seems an unnecessarily high octane tourist attraction.
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