14 DAY TRIAL // Time trialing is often called the race of truth because it often serves to expose a rider’s weakness and requires both a lot of muscle power and a deep understanding of the technique from specialist riders.
The 100th edition of Le Tour de France has three races against the clock and the first one is the most complex of them because it asks cyclists to work as a team, constantly moving to the head of the column, negotiating tight turns and sometimes the unexpected loss of a comrade.
Team time trials are hard to simulate in a good way and Pro Cycling Manager 2013 uses effort times and rider roles to show how they play out in real life.
Unfortunately, the experience of actually playing one is pretty boring, especially because it involves watching all the rivals going around the track in real time (which can be sped up to make things move along somewhat faster).
This year’s team time trial is about 24 kilometers long and takes place around Nice, in southern France.
The distance means that no team can gain too much time on rivals so I take the brave decision to deal with the stage in my virtual Tour by simply pushing the Quick Simulation button.
This means that I skip the 3D stage and PCM 2013 simply mashes numbers together, in a mysterious way, to run the stage and decide who wins it.
I expected a solid time and a place somewhere in the top five but, to my surprise, I managed to win the simulated stage by a 17-second margin from Sky, the team that is favorite in real life.
The imperfect nature of team time trials in PCM 2013 can be observed in the line-up at the finish line, which includes all nine riders from both Radioshack Leopard and my adversaries.
In the real world, only five or six would finish at the same time, with the rest sacrificed on the altar of better time.