The day a breakaway finally stays away? Giro D'italia stage 5 preview

After a crazy stage 4, where Jhonathan Narvaez won a massively reduced sprint to complete a very rapid turnaround from his stage 2 crash, and home hero Giulio Ciccone took the pink jersey with his third place stage 5, on paper looks like a much quieter stage with a breakaway being the favourites for the stage, but as shown yesterday if one team decides they really want to win the stage and keep the breakaway in check this stage could still diverge into a GC battle.



Stage 5 contains two climbs, the first basically begins from kilometre 0, but is not very steep, so expect the peloton to remain intact till the final categorised climb of the day, which while it isnt that long at 6.6km it is very steep with an average of 9% and ramps up to 15% at stages so this could see GC attacks but with the finish being just under 50km from the top with lots of that downhill it feels unlikely to see a GC battle today unless the very heavy rainfall that has been forecast causes the race to fall into cauos which given how much has happened in this years Giro in the first 4 stages means again this stage will be a must watch.

As for a winner, given it's likely to be a breakaway win, predicting who it will be is almost impossible, but I'm going to go with Koen Bouwman, who is a great climber but isnt going for GC, so will likely be given the freedom to try and make the breakaway.

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