Stage 5

The road

At the start

The sprinters get a day, with a catch

Andorra has done its work: Pogačar leads Roglič by 3:21 and Enric Mas by 3:32, and tops the points and mountains standings as well, so Hayter rides in green and Onley in white. Cian Uijtdebroeks does not start, the third man gone in five days. Today runs 171 kilometres down to the Ebro delta, flat enough for the fast men and never quite flat: the Puerto de Paüls tops out twenty-two kilometres from Roquetes.

How it was won

1. 156 km to go

   Hayter raids for the points

   Ethan Hayter wears green only because the man leading the points classification wears red, and he is forty-five behind Pogačar on it. So with seventy-three kilometres left he simply rides off the front on his own, holds it for the fourteen kilometres to Tivenys and takes the full twenty at the sprint. Van Aert nips out of the bunch behind him for seventeen more, and both are back in the fold within minutes.

2. 244 km to go

   Kron breaks the deadlock

   Nothing has moved for an hour when Andreas Kron slips clear on a nameless hill with forty-four kilometres to run and takes fifty seconds out of a peloton that cannot be bothered to answer. It lasts until the road turns toward the Puerto de Paüls and UAE, Ineos, Lidl-Trek and Red Bull all come to the front at once.

3. 323 km to go

   Paüls sheds the sprinters

   Kron is swept up with thirty kilometres left, just as the climb begins, and the Puerto de Paüls does what it was put here to do: Pedersen and Groves go out the back, the GC men shuffle forward looking for a gap that never opens, and every move is shut down before the summit. What comes over the top is still a bunch, only a thinner one.

4. 4At the line

   Brennan again, in Roquetes

   Visma have run this finale for the last hour and they run it to the line. Van Aert takes the front with eight hundred metres left and holds it through the final right-hander; Laporte comes over the top of him for the last two hundred; and Matthew Brennan comes off the wheel with a gap nobody can close. Meeus is second, Albanese third, and the 21-year-old has two stages of his first Grand Tour.

The result