Arnaud Demare took his third victory of this year's Giro d'Italia on stage 13 after the peloton thwarted a spirited breakaway within sight of the finishing line in Cuneo.
Demare once again proved the class of the sprinting field in this race as he held off Phil Bauhaus and Mark Cavendish after his Groupama-FDJ team delivered him to the front, securing his 10th career Grand Tour stage win, eight of them in the Giro.
Cavendish fought his way past Fernando Gaviria in the finale, while Bauhaus finished the fastest having launched too late, but there was no catching Demare as he extended his advantage in the points classification.
That all came after a four-man breakaway was finally reeled in inside the final kilometre.
"At some point I started to doubt that we'd be able to catch the breakaway because some elements of my team had given everything they had," Demare said. "They were very committed actually. I've also had the feeling that I was cooked myself.
"Only with 10km to go, I've started to believe it would be a sprint finish. I was at the limit for sprinting. It's exceptional to get one more win. Three is a lot."
The sprint finish saw Juan Pedro Lopez (above) pull on the pink jersey for a 10th day, still 12 seconds clear of Richard Carapaz and Joao Almeida, but there was a major blow for the general classification battle as Romain Bardet, who had been fourth at 14 seconds down, pulled out of the race through illness.
This 150km stage from Sanremo was seen as one of only two remaining sprint opportunities in the Giro - and several mountains must be negotiated before the next on stage 18 into Treviso - but the sprint teams almost blew it as a four-man breakaway came within a few hundred metres of glory.
Nicolas Prodhomme, Mirco Maestri, Pascal Eenkhoorn and Julius Van Den Berg had a lead of around three minutes early in the day but saw that more than double on the Colle di Nava as sprint teams nursed their quick men up the 10km-long climb.
That set up a fascinating battle over the remaining 95km as a tailwind helped the front group maintain their advantage, and with two-and-a-half minutes in hand heading into the last 20km, victory looked to be theirs for the taking.
But the peloton upped the pace again as the sprint teams burned their leadout men in the cause, and when the escapees began to look each other on the short rise to the finish line, their fate was sealed.
