“Drama after drama after drama... You could not have scripted that” - Was rollercoaster Giro d’Italia Stage 5 the most dramatic Grand Tour day in recent memory?

Giro d’Italia Stage 5 delivered the kind of chaos that will be replayed long after the race leaves southern Italy. A brutal day of rain, cold roads, crashes, wrong turns and shattered nerves ended with Igor Arrieta somehow taking victory in Potenza, despite appearing more than once to have thrown the stage away.

For UAE Team Emirates - XRG, it was another astonishing twist in a Giro that had already lurched from disaster to revival. After losing Adam Yates, Jay Vine and Marc Soler in the early stages, the team had responded with Jhonatan Narvaez’s Stage 4 victory. Now Arrieta has added another win, but this one came in almost unbelievable fashion.

The Spaniard had broken clear with Afonso Eulalio on the Montagna Grande di Viggiano, with both riders chasing far more than a stage win. Eulalio was also riding towards the Maglia Rosa, while Arrieta was hunting a major breakthrough of his own.

Then the race descended into a finale that looked less like a controlled Grand Tour stage and more like a survival test.

The first major twist came with around 14 kilometres remaining, when Arrieta lost control on the wet descent and hit the barriers. On most days, that would have ended his chance. Moments later, Eulalio also crashed on a slippery bend while alone at the front, reopening the contest and dragging the stage into deeper chaos.

Arrieta, bloodied but still moving, fought his way back to the Portuguese rider. The pair briefly regrouped, but the drama was still nowhere near finished. Inside the final two kilometres, Arrieta then misjudged the course and turned up the wrong road, seemingly handing the stage back to Eulalio.

Instead, he corrected himself, chased again, nearly lost control once more, and still managed to close the gap. With Eulalio fading after his own huge effort, Arrieta came back into view, reached the wheel, and then surged past to take one of the most extraordinary Giro stage wins in years.

On TNT Sports’ The Breakaway, Orla Chennaoui summed up the madness of the finale: “Drama after drama after drama.”

“For Igor Arrieta to have that comeback, not only physically but mentally, after the crash, going the wrong way, the frustration, the anger and no doubt embarrassment, to take the stage win was phenomenal,” she added.

The question now is whether Stage 5 will stand as one of the most dramatic Grand Tour days in recent memory. Not because of a long-range tactical masterclass or a duel between the race’s biggest favourites, but because of how repeatedly the stage seemed to change hands in the space of a few chaotic kilometres.

Adam Blythe was left stunned by the amount of incident packed into a two-rider finale. “Unbelievable. I've not seen a stage like that where there's so much drama between only two people,” he said on TNT Sports. “Everything that could have gone wrong, went wrong for him, and yet he still managed to pull it off. It's one of the good days for cycling when you see things like that. It's unbelievable.”

Matt Stephens also captured the sense that the stage had crossed into something almost absurd. “What a way for it to unfurl. You could not have scripted that,” he said. “We were literally sat here screaming at the television.”

For Stephens, the wrong turn should have been decisive. “At that point, it was like ‘game over’. But what a fightback. It's almost comical - you could not make this stuff up.”

There was also a major shake-up in the general classification. Eulalio missed out on the stage win, but his ride still carried him into the Maglia Rosa, giving Bahrain - Victorious a huge prize from a day of extreme difficulty.

Arrieta moved into second overall after his stage win, while Jonas Vingegaard remains more than six minutes down after another day in which the pre-race favourite stayed largely out of the spotlight. With Blockhaus looming later in the week, the Giro has already taken on a shape few would have predicted after the opening stages.

For UAE, though, Stage 5 was another defiant answer after their race looked close to ruined in Bulgaria. First Narvaez, now Arrieta. The team’s GC plan may have been ripped apart, but their Giro is very much alive.