14 DAY TRIAL // The ante-penultimate stage of Le Tour de France is designed as a transitional one, taking riders away from the Pyrenees that offered so much climbing during the three previous stages and towards the coming time trial and the final spring in Paris.
Because climbers are unwilling to put in any more work and teammates for the big favorites have already drained their energy in the mountains, there’s a chance that the remaining sprinters and a breakaway will battle for supremacy.
If a rider has kept something in reserve, he may very well try to take the stage, but expect the peloton to take things easy and to ride through the course slower than the organizers at the ASO have predicted in their daily schedule.
I plan to simulate this stage because Pro Cycling Manager 2014 has introduced an entirely new system to create results for those races that the gamer is not interested in playing in 3D.
Basically, each rider still left on the team gets an official role, and based on that, the players can also choose how they will react to some of the situations that can appear during the race.
Taking the orders and the roles into account and combining them with the form and the attributes, the game engine delivers a set of results that are designed to reflect the most probable end result.
The system seems to offer a smaller number of options than previous PCM titles, and it also has a tendency to deliver some weird results from time to time, even if the stage that’s being played should not deliver them.
I tend to simulate at least one stage for a one-week race in my full Trek Factory Racing campaign, in order to introduce an element of unpredictability to the action, but I don’t believe that it’s a good idea to use the simulation option when playing a Grand Tour.
For the nineteenth stage of Le Tour de France, the simulation decided that Diego Ulissi should be the winner of the stage, ahead of more powerful sprinters like Peter Sagan, while my own Nizzolo only managed to arrive in 42th position.
The stage was fairly unimportant and I am happy to report that I am heading into the time trial stage on Saturday with a full complement of riders, which means I have the chance to calibrate the effort for my two leaders, Schleck and Cancellara.