Tour of California: Wiggins keeps cool in heat of the battle

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Bradley Wiggins (Team Sky) made it through stage five of the Tour of California without major incident and so moved a step closer to overall victory in the stateside stage race.

Wiggins finished safely in the peloton after Taylor Phinney (BMC) held off the bunch to win a memorable stage into Santa Barbara. The overall classification remained unchanged with Wiggins retaining his lead of 28 seconds over Rohan Dennis (Garmin-Sharp) and 1:09 minutes ahead of Tiago Machado (NetApp-Endura).

The stage’s major obstacle saw the field climb San Marcos Pass but without a summit finish and with Cannondale and Orica GreenEdge willing to help set tempo in a bid to set-up Peter Sagan and Matthew Goss for the sprint and distance Mark Cavendish (Omega Pharma-QuickStep), Team Sky and Wiggins were given a relatively easy day in the saddle.

“It went really well for us out there. Several teams were prepared to share the workload with us and then Brad and Josh [Edmondson] rode tempo as Cannondale set a fast pace on the climb,” Servais Knaven said on the team’s website.

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