Britain’s Mark Cavendish raced to his third Tour of California stage victory and Latvia’s Tom Skujins retained the overall lead on Thursday in a rainy fifth stage.
Cavendish, the Etixx-Quick Step rider who won the first two stages, powered to the front in the final 200m to win the 154km leg from Santa Barbara to Santa Clarita, California, in 3 hours, 51 minutes, 37 seconds.
Cavendish waited for Australian teammate Mark Renshaw to get to the front of the peloton.
Photo: AFP
“I had Mark Renshaw at the end, and as always he was cool and calm, but we had to dig deep,” Cavendish said. “Daniel Oss attacked in last kilometer and Mark was cooked, so we couldn’t go as fast as we wanted in the end. It was a headwind finish and I knew I didn’t want to jump early.”
Cavendish has 131 career victories, eight in the Tour of California.
Belgium’s Zico Waeytens of Team Giant-Alpecin was second and Slovakia’s Peter Sagan of Tinkoff-Saxo was third — in the same time as Cavendish.
Sagan, who won the fourth stage and finished second in the first three stages, gained four bonus seconds to cut Skujins’ lead to 18 seconds with three stages left in the eight-day race.
Skujins, who rides for the Hincapie Racing Team, assumed the race lead with a solo win in the third stage. He finished in the peloton on Thursday.
“My guys did amazing,” Skujins said.
“We managed to not let the break get too far ahead. We kept them close, 3:30 or so. We knew after the last descent that it could be tailwind, or tail-cross, fast finish, had them at 2 minutes... It didn’t get too out of hand,” he said.
France’s Julian Alaphilippe of Etixx-Quick Step was third overall, 44 seconds back.
With snow forecast for yesterday for the individual time trial in Big Bear Lake, race organizers have revised and shortened what was viewed as a key day for the general classification contenders.
Instead of riding a 24.3km time trial at more than 2,000m, the field will negotiate a 10.5km course starting and ending at the Magic Mountain theme park. Potential time gaps were likely to be greatly reduced.
A women’s invitational time trial was to be held on the same course before the men’s event.
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