A short stage ends the Tour of California and with the route giving us a bigger selection this year the riders will be relieved to see a nice flat one to end with.
There are two 5-3-1 mountains primes but no-one who was a threat to the new King of the Mountains leader from yesterday got in the days break of the day.
Taylor Phinney looks set for a clean sweep of the jerseys. His team also lead the team rankings as well so it could be a long time on the podium for the phenomenal 21 year old.
It is an interesting 7 man break in that two of the riders are in the top 20 on GC. The two well placed riders are Rasmus Guldhammer and Maxim Iglinski
Team B and O have had a fairly quiet race with a few fairly powderpuff attacks from Domenik Klemme all to show. But Guldhammer was near the front at the key stages yesterday and sits 5th on the young rider classification, he could be one for the future for this forward thinking squad.
Fedrigo of course led the race for two days and is looking to top up his KoM points gained in the opening stage.
He takes both the primes to move to outright 4th place in that competition, not a bad effort from the Nestle man who has at least given that squad something after the problems with their team leader Vladimir Karpets
But the chances of the break to succeed are doomed with Hollister working very hard at the front to close them down in the closing stages.
Their reasons are two fold, firstly to protect Robert Kiserlovski in 10th place on GC and to set up the sprint for Allan Davis.
The American squad have not quite been able to get the big result but both their leaders have looked in nick.
They were left largely alone in their chase so the job of work was hard but they make the catch with 5.5km left.
Carmuese rather dastardly were waiting behind for much of the last 20km of the chase and as soon as the catch is made they burst through looking for a carbon copy of stage two of the race.
We get two distinct sprint trains today though with Hollister still having enough left to try out one.
So the Carmuese train goes: Caethoven, Roelandts Óscar Avelino Maximiliano Richeze Raúl Granjel Cabrera Taylor Phinney
and the Hollister train Selander, Davis Michel Kreder Romain Vanderbiest Anthony Lavoine Francisco Ventoso
The fading Carmuese lead out rider blocks Phinney, Richeze and Granjel Cabriera!
Phinney looks determined though to get back in this and as Selander blocks Lavoine and Ventoso Davis tries to get on Phinney's wheel.
Davis moves inside Phinney as they take the turn and the young American clips his wheel and down he goes!
Roelandts moves clear with Avelino, the Portueguese sprinter cannot get on terms with the Belgian.
The Belgian seems ignorant of the crash and celebrates to a muted response. Davis comes through for second and Vanderbiest pips Avelino for third.
But the real story seems to be behind as the riders fall like dominoes.
It's a huge mass crash and some riders look like they will not make it to the finish line.
No-one could tell who was at fault Phinney or Davis or perhaps inserting a tight last bend in the final kilometre didn't help matters. Phinney does make it to the line to pick up all four of his jerseys and the team classification for Wikipedia.
No time losses will be recorded but four very unlucky riders do not make it. Milka lose two more riders (they finish with just three riders) in: Matej Vysna Adrian Honkisz
Also forced to abandon is baby faced American: Tom Danielson
But the most shocking news of all and one that is sure to fuel the already despairing Festina manager is the news that Alberto Contador is forced to abandon from 5th place on GC. It has been a terrible year of unlucky crashes for them.
