Nico Denz salvages Red Bull's Giro d'Italia with solo win on Stage 18 as Juan Ayuso abandons due to bee sting
Updated 29/05/2025 at 18:34 GMT+1
Nico Denz salvaged Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe's Giro d'Italia with an opportunistic win from the breakaway on Stage 18. Denz got in the key move on the circuit in Cesano Maderno, missed by fellow breakaway acts Mads Pedersen and Wout van Aert, then went solo to the finish to triumph by over a minute. Earlier, Juan Ayuso abandoned the race after suffering an allergic reaction to a bee sting.
Emotional Denz saves Giro for Red Bull with solo win from breakaway
Video credit: TNT Sports
Germany’s Nico Denz proved himself the strongest of a huge 37-man breakaway to save Red Bull-Bora Hansgrohe’s Giro d’Italia by soloing to an emotional Stage 18 win in Cesano Maderno.
One of the last riders to join a stellar breakaway that also included big-hitters Mads Pedersen (Lidl-Trek), Wout van Aert (Visma-Lease a Bike) and Kaden Groves (Alpecin-Deceuninck), Denz managed to bridge over to the lead group when the final selection was made with around 33km remaining of the 144km stage around Lake Como.
The 31-year-old then put in his decisive move inside the final 20km to open up a commanding gap on his chasers. Drawing on the experience from winning two stages in three days in 2023, Denz held on for his third - and, he claimed, most emotional - win in the Giro, to give his team a boost following the earlier withdrawals of their star riders Jai Hindley and Primoz Roglic.
Italy’s Mirco Maestri (Polti VisitMalta) won the sprint for second place ahead of Belgium’s Edward Planckaert (Alpecin-Deceuninck) when the chasers came home just over one minute down on the day’s winner.
Fast finishers Pedersen, Van Aert and Groves were part of the remnants of the break which crossed the line almost four minutes down, before race leader Isaac del Toro (UAE Team Emirates) came home safely in the peloton 14 minutes in arrears.
If Thursday’s stage was a relative day of rest for Del Toro ahead of two decisive days in the high mountains, the 21-year-old Mexican was dealt a blow with the withdrawal of his UAE team-mate Juan Ayuso.
Injured since his fall on the Tuscan gravel at the end of the first week, Ayuso started the day with a swollen eye following a bee sting - and the Spaniard soon climbed off his bike on the first of the day’s three categorised climbs. Del Toro will now enter the final phase of the race with just five team-mates following the earlier withdrawal of the Australian Jay Vine.
But the day belonged to Denz, who opened up about the sacrifices he and his Red Bull team-mates have made - and how they needed to bounce back following the disappointments of losing their leader Roglic and the 2022 champion Hindley early in the race.
"This is probably the most emotional win [of my career] after losing Jai [Hindley] early on and then Primoz [Roglic]," an ecstatic Denz said after securing Red Bull’s first win since the Volta a Catalunya in March.
"We invested a lot and everybody in the whole team - not only the riders but the staff – had this one big goal of winning the Giro d’Italia with Primoz Roglic.
"We were on altitude for two months, I’m now three months gone from home – didn’t see my wife or my children - and in the end, if you lose a leader like Primoz, you also lose a dream. It feels like all this hard work is for nothing.
"Luckily we turned around and could motivate ourselves, with Giulio [Pellizzari] doing a fantastic job in the GC and now winning here today for me - on Father’s Day, by the way - it’s pretty special."
And to think that Denz almost did not make the breakaway when it formed during a tense and fast opening hour of racing towards the glistening waters of Lake Como in Il Lombardia territory in northern Italy.
Quadruple stage winner Pedersen was among many of the early attacks before he finally found himself in a large group along with Lidl-Trek team-mate Mathias Vacek. Belgium’s Van Aert was alert to the dangers and also bridged over to the move, with Denz among one of the last riders to join a 37-man breakaway that had all the attributes to go the distance.
With three men in the move, Alpecin-Deceuninck drove the pace on the Cat.2 climb to Parlasco with Planckaert and Fabio van den Bossche laying the groundwork for their man Groves, winner of Stage 6 to Naples.
Given the presence of Pedersen, Groves and Van Aert in the move, it soon became clear that there would be neither the firepower nor the desire from any of the teams in the peloton to close the gap. And so that proved, with the advantage quickly growing above 10 minutes soon after the struggling Ayuso threw in the towel.
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Two days after his victory at San Valentini, Italy’s Christian Scaroni (XDS Astana) took maximum points over all three of the day’s categorised climbs to protect team-mate Lorenzo Fortunato’s near-unassailable lead in the blue jersey standings, while strengthening his own second place in that same competition.
For his part, Pedersen won both intermediate sprints to all but guarantee the Dane victory in the maglia ciclamino standings.
The first shake-out came after Italy’s Manuele Tarozzi (VF Group-Bardiani CSF-Faizane) went clear with team-mate Martin Marcellusi and Frenchman Remy Rochas (Groupama-FDJ) after winning the Red Bull sprint inside the final 60km.
The trio built a lead of 35 seconds as the jostling started behind. Rochas and Marcellusi sat up as Tarozzi pressed on - and it was shortly after the Italian was caught that the break split again following a move from Van Aert’s team-mate Dylan van Baarle with 33km remaining.
The former Paris-Roubaix winner was joined by Belgians Planckaert and Dries De Bondt (Decathlon-AG2R La Mondiale), Dutchman Daan Hoole (Lidl-Trek), Australia’s Alex Edmondson (Picnic PostNL), the American Larry Warbasse (Tudor Pro Cycling) and Italians Maestri, Filippo Magli (VF Group), Davide De Pretto (Jayco-AlUla) and Nicola Conci (XDS Astana), before Denz became the last man to ride over.
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With team-mates up the road, the heavily fancied trio of Van Aert, Pedersen and Groves - all stage winners on this Giro so far - seemed content to sit back and let it play out, with the gap growing accordingly.
If it looked certain that one of the 11 leaders would win the stage, Denz had no intention of letting it come down to a sprint. Very active as the race started two laps of a finishing circuit in Cesano Maderno, Denz eventually wore down his fellow escapees with a decisive attack with 18km remaining.
Before they could do anything about it, the German’s gap was 30 seconds and it looked to be a lost cause. De Bondt and Stage 10 time trial winner Hoole both tried to counterattack - but it was too little, too late.
Twice a winner from breakaways in 2023, Denz soared to an impressive third stage win in the Giro – drawing a line under Red Bull’s troubled race ahead of Pellizzari’s push for a top-five finish in Rome.
"When Primoz left the Giro, I went through the road book and realised there was only this stage that I could possibly win," Denz said.
"So I had the plan, and I had the freedom to go for it today. I got in the break and then just followed my instincts. In the final, the group wasn’t really collaborating and I thought I’d give it a shot. I saw that I had a small gap - and then just went, all on one card."
The gamble paid off, with Denz able to sit up and savour the win before a frustrated Maestri led the chasers home 1’01" down.
Now the focus of this intriguing 108th edition of La Corsa Rosa switches back to the battle for pink, with the top three separated by just 51 seconds ahead of two key stages in the high Alps.
Del Toro will look to defend his slender lead on Ecuador’s Richard Carapaz (EF Education-EasyPost) and Briton Simon Yates (Visma-Lease a Bike) - with Canada’s Derek Gee (Israel-Premier Tech) lurking at 1’57" in fourth – on the queen stage of the race.
Stage 19 features over 5,000m of climbing and a succession of five peaks before a short and fast downhill ride into Champoluc. Yates and his rivals will then return to the Colle delle Finestre on Saturday, the site of his implosion while in the pink jersey in 2018.
Following team-mate Denz’s morale-boosting Stage 18 win, Italy’s Pellizzari will also look to improve on his seventh place before the Giro concludes in Rome on Sunday.
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