Kaden Groves picked the right line in a pell-mell sprint finish into Naples to take his first stage win of the 2025 Giro d'Italia. The Australian sprinter delivered on a huge amount of work by his Alpecin-Deceuninck team and had a clean line to the finish even as his main rival, Visma-Lease a Bike's Olav Kooij, found himself boxed in and obstructed. Mads Pedersen (Lidl-Trek) finished over five minutes down, but a crash-filled day saw him among the fallers, and the race jury opted to neutralize all GC gaps at the finish, so he will keep his pink leader's jersey.
A day that started quiet and should have ended in a straightforward bunch sprint got scrambled with cool, wet weather that saw numerous crashes, including a chain reaction series of falls around 70 km to go that brought down Pedersen and roughly 20 other riders and briefly forced a total neutralization of the race. Three riders DNF'd due to the crash, including Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe's Jai Hindley.
How it happened
- The longest stage of the 2025 Giro saw a breakaway almost from the gun at the start in Potenza but the numbers, or makeup (which included TT winner Josh Tarling of Ineos Grenadiers) wasn't to the peloton's liking and it was reabsorbed.
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