Cavendish Leads The Giro D'Italia

Last updated : 08 May 2011 By Covsupport News Service

Mark Cavendish leads the Giro D'Italia after the second stage today.

This was the longest stage of the tour and was 244km from Alba to Parma.

Sebastian Lang went twenty minutes clear to grab the King Of The Mountains jersey but steadily with HTC Highroad doing a lot of work, the gap was wiped out.

The peleton was altogether after an eight man break had tried their luck. Garmin's David Millar was at the front with a kilometre to go.

They approached the final straight with Allesdandro Petacchi ahead. Mark Cavendish, who again had been led out well by his team, was forced to go round the far side after Petacchi had moved in front of him but it was the 37 year old italian who was first over the line in a time of 5hr 45 mins and 40 seconds and kept the race win in the opinion of the race commisares.

Mark Cavendish (pictured below) was rightly furious but claimed that his protests were not aimed at Petacchi. He tweeted: 2I'm always disqualified for every little move, but this is not Petacchi's fault. It's the fault of the jury or ...teams who have a prejudice against me. So I'm sorry to Petacchi for taking my frustration out on him. What happened today is sprinting."

Petacchi pleaded all innocence saying to our friends on cyclingnews.com: "I don't think I did anything wrong in the sprint. When you see someone coming up you go looking for him and I moved a bit, but I didn't do anything wrong. But I apologise if I did.

"To be honest, the only thing that I noticed is that when I saw him coming up before the sprint, I let him pass along the barriers. I could have closed the door but I didn't."

Cavendish will wear the Maglia Rosa tomorrow.
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Marcel Kittel also won the final stage of the 4 Jours de Dunkerque this afternoon.

The German rider of Skil-Shimano was the fastest in the peloton sprint and won for the fourth time in five days. Kittel finished before Yauheni Hutarovich (Francaise des Jeux) en Michael van Staeyen (Topsport Vlaanderen).

His victory was already the tenth win of the Skil-Shimano cycling time in this season. Besides the four stage wins Kittel also won the points classification of the Hors Category stage race in France.

In the general classification Thierry Hupond managed to hold his sixth place. Overall winner is Thomas Voeckler (Europcar).