Modolo wins dash to Terraza del Portezuelo in Tour de San Luis

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Sacha Modolo launched a brilliantly timed sprint to claim the second stage of the Tour de San Luis to Terraza del Portezuelo, finishing ahead of Mark Cavendish (Omega Pharma-Quickstep) and Leigh Howard (Orica GreenEdge). The Bardiani-CSF Inox rider reversed his fortunes from stage 1, where he was beaten by Cavendish by a clean set of wheels, and moved himself into the race leader's jersey thanks to today's victory. He is now tied on time with Cavendish as there are no time bonuses awarded at the finish.

This was perhaps a coming-of-age victory for the 25-year-old from Conegliano who has often failed to deliver against the best sprinters in the world and never taken the scalp of Cavendish in a head-to-head sprint. What made Modolo's perfectly timed sprint even more impressive was the fact that he hadn't seen the twisting uphill sprint and believed he was going to compete on another pan flat course when he rolled out of Tilisarao.

"I was asked if I'd seen the finish and I thought it was going to be flat. During the race I started talking to other riders and I started to understand that it was going to be more difficult that I'd planned. I'm a good sprinter, but when's it's totally flat it doesn't suit me as much," Modolo said before praising the efforts of his team. "It's important to have a strong team but sometimes it's not enough. Today with the team, and we're a small team, we showed and proved that we can beat the WorldTour teams. It's great because we're all young riders and a good group of friends. I'm not the only one who won today, all my teammates won today. For me I just had to worry about the final few meters."

When the peloton rolled out Tilisarao earlier in the day the pace picked up from the gun with riders keen to form an early break and put overnight leaders Omega Pharma-QuickStep under immediate pressure.

Leandro Messineo (San Luis Somos Todos), Julian P. Gaday (Buenos Aires Provincia), Martin Hacecky (ASC Dukla Praha), Ben Jacques-Maynes (Jamis-Hagens Berman) and Emmanuel Guevara (San Luis Somos Todos) established a gap at the 8 kilometre mark, and Cavendish duly positioned his teammates on the front soon after.

The Manxman may not have been aware of Guevara, who was one of the more exciting if not most maverick riders from last year's race, had infiltrated the early breaks in three separate stages at the 2012 edition. Last year he also came close to winning the sprint jersey and led the classification going into the final day but was unceremoniously kicked out of the race for brawling with Colombian riders after the first intermediate sprint of the stage.

Last year's encounters clearly hadn't fazed Guevara though, and he growled the break into an orchestrated effort as Omega Pharma-QuickStep patrolled the peloton.

The lead peaked at 4:45 at the 70 kilometre mark but by then Guevara was beginning to suffer, his bark perhaps worse than his bite. Troubles with his left knee and persistent vomiting saw him drop back, first to the team car, and then to the peloton. Nonetheless, Guevara had already claimed the stage's solitary KOM located 55 kilometres into the stage.

With their cohesion broken and morale dented the break's lead began to tumble and dropped to 2 minutes inside the final 74 kilometres. Aware that the break were on the ropes too soon the peloton briefly switched off, allowing the gap to buffer out to 3:30.

With less than 50 kilometres to go Cannondale mustered their troops on the front, intent on making up for a miss-firing stage one in which Peter Sagan and Sebastian Haedo lost contact with each other in a hectic sprint finish. The injection of pace from the bunch was too much for Gaday who cracked with 34km to race, leaving just three riders dangling a minute ahead of the bunch.

Messineo picked up the final intermediate sprint with the bunch at just 40 seconds but by then Omega Pharma, GreenEdge and Cannondale were in sight. Trentin offered up the perfect lead out for Cavendish but Modolo had the edge, slipping past the 2011 World Champion for the win.