Brazilian Luciano Pagliarini, the winner of Stage 4 into Columbia in the 2007 Tour of Missouri, finished atop the podium Saturday in Stage 6 of the Tour of California.

The Saunier Duval-Scott rider actually crossed the finishing line second behind High Road’s Mark Cavendish, but Cavendish was hit with a 20-second penalty for hitching a ride on a team car to catch back up to the peloton after crashing on the second of three circuits in Santa Clarita. The crash also took out Rock Racing’s Mario Cipollini and hard-luck Freddie Rodriguez. Cipollini was irate after the race and berated Cavendish, with whom he finished in the official standings at 20 seconds behind after the docking of time.

More upset than Cipo was team High Road, which felt the penalty was unjust — as cyclingnews.com reports.

Stage 2 winner J.J. Haedo of CSC officially was second, with world champion Paolo Bettini of Quick Step third. High Road’s  Gerald Ciolek and Oscar Freire of Rabobank rounded out the top five.

Stage 4 winner Dominque Rollin of Toyota-United started his sprint a bit too early and ended up sixth.

The peloton finished virtually in tact in 4 hours 18 minutes 31 seconds for the 105-mile stage after Astana, High Road, Quick Step and Rabobank brought back the six-man breakaway of Slipstream-Chiptle/H3O’s Steven Cozza, CSC’s Karsten Kroon, Alexandre Pichot of Bouygues Telecom, David Canada of Saunier Duval-Scott, Credit Agricole’s Christophe Le Mevel, and Rory Sutherland of Health Net-Maxxis.

Defending champion Levi Leipheimer of Astana remained in the yellow jersey with a 49-second lead over David Millar of Slipstream and 1:08 ahead of American Christian Vandevelde, also of Slipstream.

The Tour of California concludes Sunday with a 93-mile ride from Santa Clarita to the finishing line at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena.

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