For the second time in this year's race, Pavel Brutt animated a stage of the Eneco Tour. Today he made a well-timed move in the finale and almost held off all the favourites.

A late attack by Katusha Team rider Pavel Brutt ignited the action in the final kilometer of racing in Friday’s stage 5 of the Eneco Tour. Jumping from the reduced field on the last time up the Muur, Brutt caught and passed the lone leader to charge ahead for the finish line located 700 meters up the famous cobbled climb. Brutt just missed the win by two seconds.

"We passed the final kilometer for three times, so I knew the finish. But I can’t say it was a planned attack. Most likely I saw the appropriate situation for an attack with 3 kilometers to go. A rider of Wanty was in front and I decided that it was a right moment to try to join him and then to do a solo attack. With 1 kilometer to go I saw that I had around 100 meters to the main group, so I decided to start my attack and to give 100%, but I missed the win by the closest margin. We still have two hard stages – tomorrow we will have a stage on the course of Liege – Bastogne – Liege, while on Sunday some of the stage will be held on the route of the Amstel Gold Race. I think there will be a great Battle in the peloton. I will try to show my best result. In addition we have Viacheslav Kuznetsov. Today he did a strong race and he also has good chances for a successful performance," said Pavel Brutt.

"It was a very hard stage with 19 climbs, but our team was able to show a really high result. We had two leaders – Pavel Brutt and Viacheslav Kuznetsov - so the team did its best to support our guys who were impressive. We could follow the strongest riders, true specialists in this kind of races, and I am happy how our team spent the final of the stage. Finally we made the podium, and Pavel was very close to a victory. His attack was almost ideal. We know the podium in such a hard race is a nice result. Tomorrow we will have another hard day on the road, and we will continue to fight," said sports director of Team Katusha, Torsten Schmidt.

BMC’s Greg Van Avermaet motored ahead of Brutt to take the win, with Tom Dumoulin (Giant-Shimano) in second place just ahead of Brutt, both at 2-seconds behind the winner after three hours and 45-minutes of racing. The top of the leader board shifted again with Dumoulin taking the lead by 2-seconds to Lars Boom of Belkin. Katusha’s Pavel Brutt is sixth at 23-seconds for the general classification.

Two stages remain in the 2014 Eneco Tour. Saturday’s stage 6 is 173.3km from Heerlen to