New Zealand’s George Bennett claimed the overall victory Sunday in Pasadena after he and his fellow riders in the colorful peleton raced along the streets of La Cañada Flintridge in the final stage of a seven-day, 583-mile Amgen Tour of California, the largest professional cycling stage race in America.
Riding for Team LottNL-Jumbo’s, Bennett finished with an overall time of 22 hours, 54 minutes and 38 seconds, for his first WorldTour overall race win.
Poland’s Rafal Majka, riding for BORA-hansgrohe, finished 35 seconds back in second place. A trio of American riders rounded out the top five: Andrew Talansky, Brent Bookwalter and Ian Boswell finished third, four and fifth.
“It’s a race all the riders look forward to. We used to think of coming to California as a holiday race, a fun, away-from-home time where you could sit and take it a bit easy, but now it has turned into a super-hard race and a really competitive race… You see a lot of big stars here now,” said Bennett. “Today is really special. I had a few hours last night to let it sink in, and then it clicked over to business time, and we knew we had a job on our hands today, and we were up to the task. It’s really relieving to be over the line and still have this jersey on.”
— Mirjam Swanson
