14 DAY TRIAL // The twelfth stage of the 2014 edition of Le Tour de France is another transition one, designed to take the peloton from one mountain range to another, and the ambiguous nature of the course probably means that, once more, breakaway specialists and classic sprinters will be the ones contesting the win.
In real life, cycling teams tend to do a lot of recon work for the big tours and they try to decide as soon as the full race course is published which stages they want to target and how much energy each rider is supposed to use in order to get a good result.
On television, cycling might look like a contest built around endurance and speed, but there’s a huge amount of strategy involved, and a lot of it takes place well before the actual racing starts.
When I launched this simulation of Le Tour de France, I just glanced at the stages beforehand rather than exploring them in depth, which might be a long-term problem for me.
I am not sure which of them I actually want to win and which can be safely ignored, and that means a lot of my riders put in a lot of effort when they should not have.
Once more, my initial plan is to sit back and leave other teams to try and win in the 12th stage. Meanwhile, I will make sure that my leaders are protected for what’s coming later in the week.
The stage was pretty boring and uneventful, with a seven-man group trying to stay away for the duration of the stage and the rest of the riders left in the race pretty uninterested in bringing them back.
This can happen when no one is willing to commit and do the work, and this tends to favor those who have put in the work to get clear at the start of the day.
Saxo Bank is only willing to protect Contador, and the sprinters have faded a lot after the mountains that we climbed before the first rest day.
On the final short climb, I sent Cancellara once again to the front, hoping that the escape group was too tired to stand up to his speed, but Enrico Gasparotto still had something in reserve and stayed clear to take a prestigious solo win.
My Swiss rider arrived in second and once again managed to perform much better than my designated sprinter.