Italy’s Filippo Ganna on Wednesday gave Team Ineos a boost with a breakaway win in the fifth stage of the Giro d’Italia through the southern Calabria region, with Portugal’s Joao Almeida tightening his grip on the leader’s pink jersey.
Ineos on Tuesday lost their lead rider Geraint Thomas to a broken pelvis, and subsequently promised to target stage wins instead of the overall standings.
“A success that partially redeems the team after Thomas’s unfortunate retirement,” said 24-year-old Ganna after his second stage win in this year’s race.
Photo: EPA-EFE
It was also the time-trial specialist’s first ever win on a road race and given his huge frame, is an astonishing result for a stage where a slender climber had been expected to triumph.
Ineos had a disappointing Tour de France with defending champion Egan Bernal’s withdrawal, and Ecuadorian Richard Carapaz is not defending his Giro d’Italia title.
The powerfully built world time-trial champion Ganna crossed the line alone 34 seconds ahead of a group of favorites, including Team Deceuninck Quick-Step’s Almeida, who finished third just behind Austrian Patrick Konrad of Bora-Hansgrohe.
Ganna won Saturday’s opening time-trial in Palermo, and on his first Giro d’Italia has two more time-trials to target.
“It was not planned for me to go in the breakaway,” Ganna said. “Then after some attacks this morning, I told Salvatore [Puccio] to stay on my wheel.”
“We managed to go in the breakaway, then all went incredibly well,” he added.
The race crossed to mainland Italy after four days in Sicily, covering 225km from Mileto to Camigliatello Silano.
Ganna was the sole survivor of a breakaway launched before the 50km mark on the rolling slopes of the Valico di Montescuro, attacking with 17km to go.
The Italian left Belgian Thomas De Gendt and Colombian Einer Rubio in his wake, after the pair had counterattacked at the foot of the climb, cresting the summit one minute ahead of his pursuers.
In the descent, uneven and slippery in the rain, Italian two-time Giro winner Vincenzo Nibali set the pace and tested his rivals.
The Italian held on for the stage win, while his compatriot Nibali, winner in 2013 and 2016, remains well positioned in sixth, one-minute adrift of Almeida.
“It was a very cold stage, with some rain,” said Almeida, who extended his two-second overnight advantage to 43 seconds on second-place Spaniard Pello Bilbao.
A runner who stopped during a marathon in China to pose doing the splits and another who hoarded energy gels have been banned for two years, the local athletics association said yesterday. The incidents happened during Sunday’s marathon in Sichuan Province’s Chengdu and were widely shared online. Videos showed a female runner stopping suddenly and dropping to the ground in the splits position, holding up her arms in a heart shape as she apparently posed for a photograph. She “committed obstructive fouls during the race, affecting the safe participation of other runners,” the Sichuan Athletics Association said in a statement, which identified
Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli yesterday vowed to “keep raising the bar” after winning the Japanese Grand Prix to become the youngest driver in Formula One history to lead the championship standings. The 19-year-old Italian took advantage of a mid-race safety car to jump into the lead after a dreadful start from pole position, crossing the line ahead of McLaren’s Oscar Piastri and Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc. Antonelli’s Suzuka victory came two weeks after the first grand prix win of his career in China, and sent him top of the championship standings after three races, nine points ahead of team-mate George Russell. Mercedes are struggling to
Liverpool star Mohamed Salah on Tuesday said that he would leave the English club at the end of the Premier League season, marking an earlier-than-planned departure for one of the club’s greatest-ever scorers and soccer’s biggest names. The 33-year-old Egypt forward, who has scored 255 goals in 435 appearances for Liverpool, “reached an agreement” to quit the team a year before his contract was due to expire, the Premier League champions said. Salah’s form has dipped in his ninth year at Anfield, to such an extent that he was dropped for a stretch of games late last year — leading to the
There were some big games to be played yesterday in the NBA, with the Atlanta Hawks to play the Detroit Pistons in a matchup pitting a Hawks team who are rolling against a Pistons team trying to lock up the Eastern Conference’s No. 1 seed. The Oklahoma City Thunder were to play the Boston Celtics, a showdown featuring the two most recent champions, while the Houston Rockets faced the Minnesota Timberwolves, a game that could factor mightily into Western Conference seeding. Elsewhere, the Washington Wizards were to play the Utah Jazz, with the Wizards on a 16-game slide visiting against a team
RSS