Tirreno Adriatico stage 5 wrap-up

Cancellara reverses CSC's fortunes; Rabo maintains lead, now with Dekker

Sunday's time trial in Servigliano brought about an expected winner in Team CSC's Fabian Cancellara, who reversed the bad luck the team experienced earlier in the week with crashes and injuries both in Paris-Nice and Tirreno Adriatico. A surprise second, however, was Belgian Leif Hoste (Discovery Channel), while Thomas Dekker's third place saw the leader's jersey swap shoulders within his Rabobank team as Oscar Freire relinquished the race lead to his younger team-mate.

Due to forecasts of snow, RCS, the organisers of Tirreno-Adriatico decided to take out tomorrow's heavily anticipated mountain-top finish to Monte della Laga in San Giacomo, making it difficult for those high on general classification - namely Jörg Jaksche (Liberty Seguros-Würth @ 0'14), Alessandro Ballan (Lampre-Fondital @ 0'20) and the Discovery Channel pairing of Paolo Savoldelli (@ 0'40) and Tom Danielson (0'47) - to overhaul the 21 year-old. Trained by Luigi Cecchini and considered one of the biggest future stars in world cycling, Dekker the younger had improved his climbing considerably over the winter, going as far to break Basso's winter record time on the 936m high Monte Serra, so it would have been an interesting test regardless.

Instead, the fifth stage will conclude with five finishing circuits in Torricella Sicura before the final stage on Tuesday in San Benedetto del Tronto's urban circuit.

See also:
Full results & report
Photos
Stages
Start list