After two successive summit finish battles at the 2025 Volta a Catalunya, there is absolutely nothing to seperate Primoz Roglic and Juan Ayuso. On stage 4, it was the Slovenian who took the stage win though, narrowly emerging victorious ahead of his Spanish rival.
12 riders managed to get themselves up the road and into the day's break relatively early on in the stage. The most notable names in the group included Lennard Kämna (Lidl - Trek), Johannes Staune-Mittet and Geoffrey Bouchard (Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale Team), Georg Steinhauser (EF Education - EasyPost), Frank van den Broek (Team Picnic PostNL) and Jesús Herrada (Cofidis).
On the climb of the Turó del Puig at around 60km to go, the break began to split apart, with both Staune-Mittet and Steinhauser proving the strongest of the group and beginning the descent clear together at the head of the race. At 30km to go, Staune-Mittet and Steinhauser led the remainder of the break by 45 seconds, with the peloton still over two minutes down.
Behind the two leaders meanwhile, the break was splitting up again as Van den Broek, Bouchard, Brieuc Rolland and Jose Felix Parra dropping the rest of the chase inside the final 20km. With Bouchard having a teammate up ahead in the form of Staune-Mittet though, only three of the chase were doing any work.
By the time the final climb began at around 8.5km to go, the peloton were absolutely flying, with the gap to the front now cut to only around a minute. At the front meanwhile, Steinhauser was attempting to make his move on Staune-Mittet. By 6.5km to go, the peloton had swept up all but the two leaders, with Steinhauser now 10 seconds clear of Staune-Mittet and 45 seconds from the bunch. At 5.3km to go, the Norwegian was caught. The pace being set by UAE Team Emirates - XRG was causing casualties too, with the likes of Laurens De Plus and Ben O'Connor in real difficulty.
When Juan Ayuso finally made his move at 2.5km to go, Steinhauser was caught and passed. Primoz Roglic though, was straight onto his rival's back wheel. Behind, Spanish duo Enric Mas and Mikel Landa were leading the chase, but into the final kilometre, it was down to Ayuso and Roglic once again. As the two leaders started to play games though, the chase group came right back into things thanks to the work done by Lennert van Eetvelt. In the sprint for the win, Roglic eventually prevailed narrowly ahead of Ayuso.
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