Brilliant Ben Healy takes first win of 2025 with 50km+ solo on stage 5 of 2025 Itzulia Basque Country!

EF Education-EasyPost's Ben Healy has taken his first win of the 2025 season and in typically aggressive style too, attacking with a more than 50km solo on stage 5 of the 2025 Itzulia Basque Country. In terms of the general classification, Joao Almeida remains in the overall race lead.

With there being some considerable hope in the peloton that the breakaway could prevail today, an illustrious group drew clear of the peloton following the early fight. Pello Bilbao (Bahrain - Victorious), Bruno Armirail (Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale Team), Ben Healy, Alex Baudin (EF Education - EasyPost), Warren Barguil (Team Picnic PostNL) and Julian Alaphilippe (Tudor Pro Cycling Team) getting themselves up the road.

After they'd spent much of the day working well together though, Healy decided to take matters into his own hands and 53km to go, attacking his breakaway companions and going solo into the stage lead. It was seemingly a perfectly timed move too because as the Irishman arrived at 30km to go, he was clear of the break by around two minutes, with the peloton a further minute down again.

As UAE Team Emirates - XRG began to accelerate hard ahead of the final climb of the day though, that time gap had been cut to 2:05 between Healy and peloton by the time the Irishman began the 4km climb at around 18.5km to go. When the peloton reached the climb though, the INEOS Grenadiers took over from UAE, setting up a fierce attack by French prodigy Axel Laurance, although he was soon caught by a counter move led by Enric Mas.

Despite these attacks, and subsequent ones from Alex Aranburu and Jordon Jegat, the peloton remained largely intact at the top of the climb, and with Healy still around two minutes up the road, the stage win was no longer in any doubt.