Mark Cavendish wins the fourth stage of the Tour of Britain
Mark Cavendish continued his dominating form at the ongoing Tour of Britain and secured his second consecutive victory at the race.
The cyclist completed the stage 4 of the race in an impressive time of 3 hours, 51 minutes and 33 seconds and restricted his major opponents.
Steele Von Hoff of Team Garmin-Sharp finished second, with Leigh Howard of Team Orica-GreenEdge, Boy Van Poppel of Team UnitedHealthcare and Daniel Schorn of Team NetApp securing the third, fourth and fifth positions in the respective order.
"Brad lives not far from Blackpool and the route included a lot of the roads he uses for training," said Cavendish.
"He told us it was very open, and very windy, and he knew the exact place we should go on the attack. It was the perfect call”.
"It was a grim day but we ploughed through and waited until that moment 22km from home to split things apart, and although it was difficult to do that with a small team, the fact Endura were riding as well made it easier”.
Niklas Gustavsson of Team UK Youth Cycling won the first sprint of the race, while Mathew Cronshaw of Team Node 4- Giordana succeeded at the second and the third sprints of the race.
Kristian House of Team Rapha Condor claimed the first, second and the third mountains of the race while Ronan McLaughlin of Team An Post-Sean Kelly was given the Rouleur Combativity Award.
Cavendish has now jumped up to the top spot after the stage 4 classifications with a healthy margin of 6 seconds over Leigh Howard of Team Orica-GreenEdge.
Boy Van Poppel of Team UnitedHealthcare Pro Cycling is further 8 seconds behind at the third position, with Luke Rowe of Team Sky Procycling and Rony Martias of Team Saur-Sojasun securing the fourth and the fifth spots respectively.
Mark is riding the Tour of Britain to fine-tune ahead of the biggest goal of his 2012 season, the UCI Road World Championships.
The cyclist will ride the event as a reigning champion and his current form is good enough to defend his rainbow jersey in Netherlands this year.
Other pre-race favourites include Peter Sagan, Andre Greipel Edvald Boasson Hagen and Matthew Harley Goss.
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