14 DAY TRIAL // The final climb of the stage might not be too hard, but given the rest of the stage and the efforts that riders have put in during the previous week, it will feel like a difficult finish and there's the potential for dramatic moves.
The 2015 Tour de France is now in the Massif Central, which lacks the huge mountains of the Alps or Pyrenees but delivers routes that give riders very limited time to rest and try to recover their energy.
In Pro Cycling Manager 2015, as in the real world, riding a three-week Grand Tour puts a lot of strain on a cyclist’s ability to recover his forces, and there are moments when even team leaders will have relatively little energy to work with during a stage.
At the moment, my riders are pretty exhausted, and even the teams controlled by the AI seem to have problems putting as many people on the front as before.
As resources tend to evaporate, the race becomes harder to control both in the real world and in the virtual medium, and those who lead the teams need to be more careful about the risks they take and the gaps that they allow to open.
Prediction: Quintana might want to secure his position with an attack in PCM 2015, while in the real world this feels like a day for Sky to control the race and for a minor rider to spring at the end and take the win.
A hard finish to forget
I might have forced my team a little too much during the first week and I am now paying the price, with my riders basically failing to perform on the final climbs, especially when another team forces the pace with two or three riders.
The two final climbs were pretty steep and allowed Katusha to take control once more and to deliver another win for Rodriguez, who managed to move much better than Froome, Nibali or Quintana, who still has the Yellow Jersey.
The biggest problem is that I allowed Romain Bardet to move past me in the General Classification and I need to find a way to get that time back.
Here's how the fourteenth stage happened in my PCM 2015 campaign:
