Sports highlights: Tour of California 2016 Stage 5-8

The "2nd half" of the tour was the like the 1st half: all stages feature exciting finishes. Stage 5 was from Lodi to South Lake Tahoe. This was another stage that the breakaway succeeded. And the winner, a young rider, should be no stranger to those who followed the tour last year. Toms Skujins won Stage 3 in San Jose in 2015 in a breakaway too. He was so new that other teams probably overlooked his ability last year and tried catching the breakaway too late. Teams certainly know his ability this year but still couldn't catch him. Stage 6 was a time trial. The big question was whether Julian Alaphilippe would retain the yellow jersey since there are quite a few good time trialists behind in the standing that could potentially overtaken him. Rohan Denis won the stage in convincing fashion but Alaphilippe responded well so he still had a healthy lead in the total time. Stage 7 was another one that featured one of my more memorable rides: Coleman Valley Road from my Levi Gran Fondo in 2011. Peter Sagan actually broke away on his own for a while and then was part of the group sprint, only finishing second to the best "pure" sprinter in the cycling world today: Alexander Kristoff. His team knew they must seize this opportunity (the next to last stage) and got the lead-out train well organized and they did a great job leading him out. Stage 8 was a loop in the State capital Sacramento which catered to the sprinters as well. The only big name sprinter that was overdue for winning a stage in this 2016 tour was Mark Cavendish, who was 2nd in total stage win to Sagan. When the riders approached the finish line, it was basically a huge mess. Cav lost his usually dependable lead-out guy Renshaw but this time it was him who successfully improvised. Cav, Sagan and Kristoff finished 1-2-3 for this last stage! And Julian Alaphilippe won the tour as the youngest ever winner (and the first French :) after the heart-breaking 2nd place overall finish last year (he led Peter Sagan up til the finish line when the latter barely grabbed the few bonus seconds) I'm looking forward to the next tour. Hopefully there will be a stage closer to home or office that I could watch in person!