Stage 6

The road

At the start

The first day that goes uphill

Ramūnas Navardauskas holds the maglia rosa by five seconds from his own team-mate Robert Hunter, with Hesjedal at eleven and yesterday's winner Mark Cavendish fourteen seconds off the lead of a Grand Tour. Out of Urbino the road never stops moving — five categorised climbs and three and a half thousand metres of climbing in two hundred and twelve kilometres — and the Lithuanian has to hold a wheel over all of it.

How it was won

1. 1157 km to go

   Eight and a half minutes

   The break is five minutes clear at forty kilometres and 8:36 clear fifteen kilometres later. Nobody in the bunch seems to have noticed that the highest-placed man in it, Luke Roberts, is twenty-fifth overall.

2. 2117 km to go

   Cingoli eats the break

   Cingoli, the first climb of the Giro's first hilly day, and it starts eating the break from the inside. Alfredo Balloni, who came into the stage leading the mountains classification, is one of the men who cracks on it.

3. 357 km to go

   Montelupone, and pink slips away

   Over Montelupone the calculators come out. Navardauskas has been hanging off the back of the bunch for an hour, the break is still minutes up the road, and the pink jersey is visibly slipping away from him.

4. 445 km to go

   Rubiano commits

   Forty-five kilometres from Porto Sant'Elpidio, Miguel Angel Rubiano rides away from the break and does not look back. Behind him the escape splinters into two chase groups that spend the rest of the afternoon arguing about who should ride.

5. 5At the line

   A Colombian alone, an Italian in pink

   Rubiano crosses the line in splendid isolation, four and a half minutes up at one point and still comfortable at the end — the greatest day of his career. The race for second is really the race for pink, and Adriano Malori edges Michał Gołaś for the twelve-second bonus that puts an Italian in the maglia rosa.

The result