14 DAY TRIAL // The seventh stage of the Tour is another one of those long, flat affairs that is only exciting towards the end for the more casual cycling watcher and tends to be enjoyed by more hardcore fans while doing something else at the same time, like maybe managing a virtual cycling team that is doing the same stage.
The only real good news is that the next stage is set in the Massif Central of France and that we might see some action that does not involve sprint trains, breakaways that are destined to be caught and big names like Contador, Evans and Schleck who are only resting their legs and eating their food.
This time around, I plan to create a sprint train made up of all my team members, except the Schleck brothers, in an effort to get that sprinting stage win that I have not yet managed to acquire.
The stage was pretty boring, meaning that the 8X acceleration helped quite a bit, and even though I did not do any actual work to bring the breakaway back to the teams for sprinters, mainly Garmin for Tyler Farrar and HTC for Cavendish, have managed to do that pretty well on their own.
Inside the last ten kilometers, I tried to get all my riders to the front and create a sprint train lead by Maxime Montfort and with Benatti at the back, ready to pounce.
Unfortunately, as you can see from the video attached to the article, I was too slow in creating the train and by the time I began to push it to the front other teams, better suited for this kind of work, were already launching the sprint.
Freire managed to get to the line first, with Boasson Hagen second, and my only consolation was that Cavendish ended up in 11th place, right behind Benatti.
Take a look at how the seventh stage played out in Pro Cycling Manager 2011 and compare it with the real-life race that took place today: