Gree-Tour of Guangxi stage 5: Sebastián Molano takes sprint victory

UAE Team Emirates’ Sebastián Molano took victory on stage 5 of the men’s Tour of Guangxi, timing his kick just right in a long sprint into Guilin.

The Colombian rider came from third position to pass Jonathan Milan (Bahrain Victorious), who had opened up the sprint, and Olav Kooij (Jumbo-Visma) in the final hundred metres, beating Kooij into second whilst Tobias Andresen (dsm-firmenich) look third.

After opening up early and sitting on the front for most of the sprint, and having arguably the best lead-out from his Bahrain Victorious team, stage 2 winner Milan had to settle for fourth.

This is Molano’s first win since the Vuelta a España, and also marks four different winners in all four sprint finishes in Guangxi as no one rider has been dominating the fast finishes.

Stage 4 winner Milan Vader (Jumbo-Visma) remains in the red leader’s jersey with one stage remaining.

A late catch before the sprint

The day started off very aggressively, with a lot of names interested in being in the day’s breakaway. Various riders tried in the first hour of racing, including Julian van den Berg (EF Education-EasyPost) and Lukas Pöstlberger (Jayco-AlUla), and a few groups were away briefly, but none stuck.

It took until just over 60km of racing had been completed before a significant move got up the road and got a real gap. Led by Dries De Bondt (Alpecin-Deceuninck), who lost the leader’s jersey on Sunday and has been in the breakaway every day but one, was perhaps predictably the rider who once again ignited this move. He was joined by Van den Berg, Ryan Mullen and Frederik Wandahl (both Bora-Hansgrohe).

This quartet slowly built up their lead, going out to a maximum of five minutes, and it remained this big with 50km to go, which started to look like it could stick with not that much time to reel the strong group back in. There were also two categorised climbs in the final 40km, so the advantage seemed to be with the leaders over the sprinters.

Cresting the second climb with 34km to go, the leaders still had over three minutes advantage, but with most of the sprinters safe in the bunch after the climbs, the lead-out teams started to ramp up at this point, and the added impetus saw the gap begin to fall more rapidly.

The leaders still had hope at 20km, holding a minute and a half advantage, but the strength and speed was in the hands of the peloton, and eventually the leaders were caught with just over 7km to go, ending De Bondt’s hopes of reclaiming the jersey.

From here, it was a battle of the sprint teams, with Bahrain-Victorious looking most organised, but ultimately dropped Milan off a touch too early and allowing Molano and Kooij to profit off of their work on the front.