14 DAY TRIAL // The 100th edition of Le Tour de France is reaching its first altitude summit today, both in the real and the virtual worlds, and this will be the first big test that my team and my leader, Andy Schleck, will face.
I was in second place a few times and I managed to win the team time trial, but a good performance on the climb to Ax 3 Domains would be more important than them.
Schleck fell on a relatively easy stage, but a bad performance on the two coming climbs would be even worse because it would put time between me and other Yellow Jersey contenders, including Contador, Froome, Valverde or Rodriguez.
The stage starts with a rather long flat section followed by an HC climb, the toughest that The Tour has to offer, before a fast descent and another uneven climb to finally separate the riders.
Pro Cycling Manager 2013 doesn’t do a great job of simulating injuries, yet I do fear that the problem Schleck had earlier in the week will affect his performance.
My playthrough of Stage 8 started off with no problems, but on the big first ascent my team blew up.
I failed to set a solid tempo and I also did a bad job of protecting my leaders while the entire peloton split into smaller groups.
I found myself far behind the leaders and I had to do a lot of work just to try and limit my losses.
My team then pushed on the descent to get to the first group of the road, but it was not long enough to achieve this objective.
The final climb was also hard and once again I was distanced and ended up losing about 3 minutes to stage leader Valverde.
Take a look at how the stage played out below.
