Tour de Pologne: Marijn van den Berg avoids sprint crash to win stage 5

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Marijn Van Den Berg (EF Education-EasyPost) captured stage 5 of the Tour de Pologne, claiming the tough uphill sprint finish with a blistering acceleration 150 metres from the line.

Race leader Matej Mohorič (Bahrain Victorious) finished several bike lengths behind, with João Almeida (UAE Team Emirates) surging past Michal Kwiatkowski (Ineos Grenadiers) to claim third.

The very hilly 198.8-kilometre stage between Pszczyna and Bielsko-Biala ended with a bunch sprint of some 40 riders, with a crash in the final kilometre bringing down some riders in the middle of the pack.

The stage was overshadowed by an earlier incident in the final local circuit, when a motorbike went off the road and struck various spectators, with initial reports saying four members of the public had been injured.

Mohoric remains the overall leader ahead of Thursday’s crucial time trial stage, a 16.6km rolling race against the clock in the city of Katowice, by a narrow margin ahead of Almeida. 

How it unfolded

No sooner had the 160 riders remaining in the race started from Pscyzyna than a blizzard of early attacks materialized, but none of them secured any lasting advantage. After the fast and furious opening segment with the first hour run off at an average speed of 45.2 kph, it was only when a move with Thomas De Gendt (Lotto-Dstny), Mick van Dijke (Jumbo-Visma), Bert Van Lerberghe (Soudal-QuickStep), Tobias Andresen (Team dsm-firmenich) and Markus Hoelgard (Lidl-Trek) finally formed that the stage settled into a more stable pattern.

The five breakaways headed into the mountainous middle segment of stage 5 with an advantage of just over three minutes. But even if the rest were not an overall threat, Hoelgard’s relatively high placing on GC, just 2:28 behind leader Mohorič, meant the quintet never going to get much more of a gap.

The five maintained their advantage on a Bahrain-led peloton over the first challenge of the day, the category 2 Zameczek, and through the constantly rolling, verdant countryside of southern Poland to the foot of the first of two category 1 ascents, the Ochodzita. They continued to collaborate well on the climb, but after initially holding the bunch at bay, Ineos’ and Bahrain’s much more aggressive riding on the second and last first-category, the Wilkowice, saw a notable shrinking of their lead.

Ineos Grenadiers continued to hammer away on the front on the rolling approach roads to Bielsko-Biala’s seven-kilometre finishing circuit, tackled three times and including a grinding uphill rise to the line.

Still with six riders in the front group, the British team piled on the pressure on the cobbled streets of Bielsko-Biala’s historic centre, even as De Gendt’s persistence reduced the front group to himself and Hoelgard. Bahrain and UAE were both still well represented, too, but on the long straightaways, with the duo clearly in their sight, the GC teams seemed under little inclination to risk more last minute attacks. Finally though, with two laps to go the gap was down to eight seconds, and while De Gendt still battled on regardless, it was only for him be swept up 13 kilometres from the line.

Ineos’ iron grip on affairs at the head of the pack and the toll of the previous climbs on the day helped prevent any more attacks from going clear. However, as news broke over race radios that there had been a crash in the finish involving a motorbike and the public, the bunch suddenly slowed before finally regaining a ragged kind of momentum in the last kilometre.

In a confused finale on the grinding three kilometre uphill to the line, Ineos hit the front again to try and to set things up for their GC contender Kwiatkowski. But while a crash within sight of the finishing gantries saw around a dozen riders go down, Van Den Berg then accelerated out of the pack to claim the first World Tour victory of his career.

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