Robin Carpenter took the biggest win of his short career when he held off all the race favourites in the first mountain stage of the USA Pro Challenge. Having originally expected his attack to be futile, the American admitted that the race neutralization had been to his advantage.

Less than two weeks ago, Robin Carpenter earned lots of praise for his aggressive showing in the Tour of Utah where he wore the mountains jersey for several days. Those performances had marked him out as a man to watch for the future and today he confirmed that he has a big future ahead of him when he won the second stage of the USA Pro Challenge.

After a frantic start, Carpenter made it into a 12-rider breakaway that escaped after 70km of racing and he survived the gradual selection on the Kebbler Pass when the many attacks started to whittle down the group. With the BMC team chasing hard, however, he started to lose ground and with 30km to go, the front group was just 30 seconds ahead.

Carpenter refused to give up and launched a solo attack. In impressive fashion he managed to extend his advantage to 1.20 and when he crested the summit 15km from the finish, he was still 45 seconds ahead.

He got some help from torrential rain that prompted the organizers to briefly stop the race and the peloton to take it easy on the descent. That allowed him to reopen his advantage sufficiently to narrowly hold off the favourites on the final climb to the finish.

"It's huge for me, it's massive, the best win I've ever had in my short career," he said. "I attacked the breakaway with about 10km to the top of climb, and after that I had no clue what was happening.

"The last time check we had was 30 seconds, and I figured I was just doing a television attack, and maybe earn the most aggressive rider jersey. I had it in my mind that if I had enough time on Kebler Pass, I could get into Crested Butte with 30 seconds, that was the plan. It ended up working out.

"It might have worked to my advantage to be out front alone, because I didn't have to deal with the mud from the wheels in front of me being kicked up into my face. I'm sure if you were in the peloton you couldn't see anything.

"I don't know how much time they gave me, but it [the neutralization] could have played to my advantage. Normally it'd be me against a team rotating, since the descent is not that steep, but since it was cold, everyone was shutting down, and there weren't many teams with riders left to chase. The rain threw a wrench in everyone's plans."