Jhonatan Narváez powered away from his breakaway rivals to win stage eight of the Giro d’Italia on Saturday for his second victory and a third for the injury-decimated UAE Team Emirates XRG.
Adam Yates, Jay Vine and Marc Soler have all been forced out of the Giro after a gruesome stage three pile up in Bulgaria, but the super-team from the Emirates has refocused impressively.
A rolling 156km stage starting from Chieti on the Adriatic seemed to favour a breakaway win. Narváez, the Ecuadorian rider who had already won stage four in a sprint, was part of a breakaway midway through the day after an original escape had been reeled in. He opened a 32-second gap at the line on Norway’s Andreas Leknessund, of Uno-X Mobility, with another UAE man, Mikkel Bjerg, third.
Afonso Eulálio, who grabbed a sizeable lead on stage five, still heads the general classification ahead of Jonas Vingegaard and Felix Gall.
Race favourite Vingegaard ignited his own Giro title bid on Friday on the formidable Blockhaus climb, finishing 13 seconds clear of Gall, while former Giro winner Jai Hindley was a further 49 seconds back in third. On Saturday, Hindley attacked on a climb to the line but crossed the summit with Vingegaard on his wheel, a slender two seconds ahead of the peloton.
Sunday’s stage nine also starts on the Adriatic and finishes with a steep climb over the final three kilometres where Eulálio will again be tested by the big guns. Monday is a day off and Tuesday sees what promises to be a decisive 42km individual time trial along Italy’s west coast. Some 15 riders have pulled out so far, compared with 25 who never made it as far as Rome in 2025.