Yeah, he's one of my favorite riders. He couldn't defend his WC title, but instead he wins the WT rankings this season with great results in many different types of races.
Tour of Beijing
The original variant is unspectacular, but this season we get the tough version with a hard mountain stage and so I'm bringing along the 8 riders with the fewest WT points so far.
Huistra won the opening stage, adding to his impressive tally this season. It was followed by a 35.3 km long TTT which our team won by less than a second over Belkin.
The mountainous stage 3with it's extreme gradients, often up to 20%, would most probably decide the GC. The only opponent of note was Zemlinsky (MON 80), who had lost 6 seconds to my riders in the TTT.
Halfway through the stage a cat. 3 climb already offered a real challenge. The team went on the dot at 60 and most of the peloton immediately lost touch, at the summit we were down to 16 riders. We relayed at low speed down the climb but the advantage still grew and so we attacked as we hit the flat.
Zemlinsky still had a team mate with him, Rayner, which meant the others didn't want to help and so it was those two against my eight riders, while they were caught by the peloton again, we created an advantage of 4 minutes at the foot of the cat. 1 climb. Zemlinsky attacked again on his own, but never got closer than 3 minutes and then faded.
Pienaar, the best of my climbers, was allowed to leave the rest of the group behind, though they could relay on the downhill sections and didn't lose much in the end.
The very last stage in 3D mode this season – this whole career maybe – was a hilly affair. We went on the dot at 60 up the first fierce climb which produced a group of 30 riders, with 5 escapees only marginally ahead. Gayko decided to set a pace which wouldn't allow the peloton to catch up again we were just along for the ride.
We tried attacking once or twice but it wasn't the right terrain for our riders. So it came down to a sprint finish which was won by Firmani (HIL 80 SPR 75), Locatelli surprised with a 2nd place. The last stage was won from the early break Huistra was only 8th, thus Firmani (10th on the stage) wins the points jersey, the mountain jersey goes to Pienaar, who also wins overall.
So, here are the final individual World Tour rankings:
The top 3 riders this season are all “returning champions”, having already had great success riding for our team, then (rightfully) demanding a high salary we couldn't or wouldn't afford, but after a season or two with other teams came back into the fold.
Overall winner is Gordillo. Back in 2019 he was riding the Continental Pro Tour and caught our eye, he signed on for two seasons with us, ranked 13th on 2020 and 4th in 2021 and we (in hindsight) needlessly let him go, he wanted a salary of 44k, which was more than reasonable.
He signed with Gayko for two years instead, had a solid first season with 117 WT points but a horrible second season, not a single point, landing outside the top 10 in all races. We brought him back in 2024 and he repaid us with two 3rd places in the WT and now his best ever finish, the top of the rankings.
Second place goes to Morillas. He's the first ever rider in this team to earn more than 50k, but I knew just how good he is, having already won the WT rankings in 2024 for us. Back then he demanded 109k to extend his contract and we let him go, but having signed only for one year with Belkin he was available again for less a year later.
Third is Akeem Lorenzen, who's been with us for a long time. He spent one season with Gayko in 2024, this is now his 7th season with our team and his best yet.
At the bottom of the top 30 is our Brazilian rider Pereira, despite winning the Tour de Suisse. However, even he collected 337 points – well, that's pretty much as good as it gets. I posted the rankings of my most successful PCM 2009 career, where I also managed to take all top 30 spots. But my weakest rider collected 185 points back then, Pereira nearly doubled that achievement.
Edited by Ripley on 05-06-2020 12:55
When I started this season and decided to share it with you I knew it'd be sickeningly successful, though I didn't know it'd be this "bad". Instead of naming all the WT races the team's won, here's the extremely short list of races we didn't win: Amstel Gold and GP Quest.
Well, I'm sorry for ruining the game for everyone. I just can't help myself, I explore every weakness, with time I've learned all these dirty tricks. When I started with PCM 14 I felt it was more difficult than PCM 2009, I had to be even more aggressive and discovered new weaknesses to take advantage of. Cyanide would need to completely revamp the AI, the game mechanics even, to stop me from "breaking" the game.
And now you know why I can't even write another story, it'll get boring quickly.
Right.
Well thanks for this, it's been a load of fun. Would still be nice to see some more statistics if that's possible? List of number of victories etc?
This was very fun to follow, Gratz I guess, top 30 fulfilled. Shame as I thought your writing and ideas are very nice, your wording is nice and I enjoy reading your summaries as much as seeing the results.
24/02/21 - kandesbunzler said “I don't drink famous people."
15/08/22 - SotD said "Your [jandal's] humour is overrated"
11/06/24 - knockout said "Winning is fine I guess. Truth be told this felt completely unimportant." [ICL] Santos-Euskadi | [PT] Xero Racing
Will you continue this or is this just the one season?
Also, can we see victories/team ranking/Superprestige Ranking?
No, I'm done. Do you really want to see more of this? Yes, next season won't be quite as good if you look at my new signings and the good riders I am letting go... but I doubt it'll make much of a difference.
Thanks for the kind words, lads! I love reading other stories and I had fun writing this, I put some effort into it to make up for the boring results. I'd like to write another story, experience a game which is more... normal, realistic. But I could only do it by using the automatic function, which is actually how this career started, the first three or four seasons I set the team on automatic and just watched. But the itch was just too strong to take over.
In case somebody wants to browse the results in more detail (or even continue playing?) I have attached the final save game.
I finally transferred all the images to imgur after never figuring out how to configure my old webspace to https. Now you can marvel again about this stupendously successful season.
