Garmin endured a tough day on the Tour of California’s second summit finish on Mountain High when leader Rohan Dennis lost a few more seconds to Bradley Wiggins in the General Classification and Tom Danielson was beaten to the stage by Esteban Chaves (Orica) and ended up third on the day, meaning that elusive stage victory still evades him.

Danielson’s aim was to get in a breakaway to put pressure on Sky and he succeeded in doing so but found himself fighting for the stage, although first Chaves attacked to win and then NetApp’s David de la Cruz passed him for second.

“I just wanted to make it as hard as possible for Sky, and so with me up the road, they had to chase hard,” Danielson said. “I went with every breakaway to try to blow them up, and then I drove the breakaway as hard as I could all day. I wasn’t really thinking about the stage, I was just thinking about Rohan. It was about trying to break the other teams. [On the final climb] I was pretty tired from the whole day. I wasn’t thinking about myself, I was thinking about the whole team and the GC overall.”

Rohan Dennis won the previous summit finish on Mount Diablo but was unable to repeat the feat, losing 2 more seconds to Wiggins, meaning he now sits 30 seconds down in second overall, but looking at the next few stages his chance of winning is most likely over.

“We had Tommy D off the front, so we were watching what Sky were doing,” Dennis said. “Hopefully, they were riding hard and they would just blow up like they did on Diablo. But, it wasn’t quite as steady an uphill; there was some downhill to recover. But when we got up to the last kilometer, I don’t think I’ve pedaled like that for a while.”

Garmin set out to try and help Dennis into the leaders yellow jersey and maybe even take the stage nut by the end of the day, they had lost the stage and maybe even the overall.