Lars-Petter Nordhaug finished in 28th position at the Giro del Piemonte as Team Sky stepped up their preparations for Saturday's Giro di Lombardia.

The Norwegian had looked comfortable throughout the 194-kilometre trek from Cossato to Cherasco and crossed the line 13 seconds behind race winner Philippe Gilbert, who defended his title by comfortably outsprinting Leonardo Bertagnolli (Androni Giocattoli) and Matti Breschel (Saxo Bank).

The 2010 edition will be forever remembered though for a farcical episode which saw the day's six main breakaway riders squander a five-minute advantage after taking a wrong turn on a roundabout just 30km from home.

Such a scenario had seemed inconceivable when the riders rolled out at the start of the day and after a flurry of early activity, Luca Solari, Alessandro De Marchi (both Androni Giocattoli), Oscar Pujol Munoz (Cervélo), Tony Gallopin (Cofidis), Sonny Colbrelli (Colnago-CSF) and Elia Favilli (ISD-Neri) eventually worked themselves free.

That sextet had built a lead of almost nine minutes as they past the 100km banner, and were still well clear when the race changed shape so dramatically.

With that threat spectacularly nullified, further attacks came thick and fast in the closing stages and Alexsandr Dyachenko (Astana) and Vladimir Gusev (Katusha) both tried their hands off the front as they hurtled into the destination town, but their bids would prove ultimately fruitless as Gilbert once again demonstrated his formidable late-season form.

Making progress

Back in the team car, sports director Sean Yates was pleased to see his riders progressing nicely and expects them to be firing on all cylinders during the final race of the season.

He told us: "The plan coming into this race was to get the kilometres in the legs, and we did that. It was quite a hard day's work but the weather was beautiful so we certainly aren't complaining.

"John-Lee [Augustyn] was a unlucky to pick up a late puncture which meant he wasn't able to make it back into the main group, but we'd always expected it to come down to a sprint and knew there wasn't a great deal we could do in that situation with the team we have here."

And as for the organisational mix-up, Yates didn't feel it had a major bearing on the event's conclusion.

He added: "I'm not quite sure what happened because I only heard the news via the race radio. I'd imagine it's highly-embarrassing for the organisers though because one minute the break were well ahead and about 10 minutes later their race was effectively over.

"They were always going to get caught back though so while it's unfortunate, I don't think it particularly changed the outcome of the race."