Giro d’Italia: Arnaud Demare wins his third stage of this year’s event

Arnaud Demare took his third victory of this year’s Giro d’Italia on stage 13 – his 10th career Grand Tour stage win.

In a thrilling sprint finish, the Frenchman held off Phil Bauhaus and Mark Cavendish, who had fought his way past Fernando Gaviria late on.

“I was at the limit for sprinting. It’s exceptional to get one more win. Three is a lot,” said Groupama-FDJ’s Demare.

“I started to doubt we’d catch the breakaway, then 10km to go I started to believe it would be a sprint finish.”

This 150km stage from Sanremo to Cuneo 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 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 and caught the breakaway inside the last kilometre.

The sprint finish saw Spain’s Juan Pedro Lopez pull on the pink jersey for a 10th day, 12 seconds clear of Ecuador’s Richard Carapaz and Portugal’s Joao Almeida, but there was a major blow for the general classification battle as France’s Romain Bardet, who had been fourth at 14 seconds down, pulled out of the race through illness.

Saturday’s stage 14 is 147km from Santena to Turin with the 21-stage race concluding in Verona with a time trial on 29 May.