It took luck, failure and many cans of soda, but my potential 6 climber just won the Giro in 2020 - Waghlon (Be a Pro Discussion)

PCMDaily Members DB announced

Jesleyh and Matt17br started working on the PCMdaily Members DB - PCM 15! What is it? As simple as it sounds, it is a database full of PCMdaily members. The riders will be named like PCMdaily users, and will have the same nationalities and avatars.

No real teams, no real races. Instead you will have the chance to see your "virtual ego" in a collection of the finest shirts made by the community, as well as taking part in races such as Volta a Cafe Pedro or Tour of the ManGame. 624 of the most active members will be in the DB, but you can apply for a wildcard entry for yourself. There's also a chance to request a certain speciality for your rider.

No release date yet, but the guys are talking about something like two weeks.

Old Stories, new Stories

Some very old PCM editions coming alive this week: roturn decided to keep on writing on his Garmin - 4th season, which is "kicking off" with the Giro d'Italia 2013. Daniel Martin as his GC-rider, Tyler Farrar as his leading sprinter. Also SportingNonsense came back with his DFL Extreme | Season 4, 2010! Run on PCM07, he still got some reports in stock. Cadel Evans enjoyed a pretty succesfull Criterium du Dauphine - Libere. Go check yourself. Now we are (patiently) waiting for valverde321 to continue his El Imbatido, as he announced two weeks ago.

Having won a free copy for PCM15 through our TdF contests, alexkr00 immediately came up with a story this week: Putting the Quick in Quick ● Step. You can take those words "quick" seriously, as the pace of the reports is just awesome. Quality stuff though.

Team Dark Dog

..won't be back.

PCMDaily Racing League

Paul23 and jihardy decided to bring back this challenge for those, who fancy the motorized stuff: the PCM.Daily rFactor Racing League 2.0 has been kicked off this week. 12 members/drivers have applied so far, but I guess it should be still open for interested members. There's a voting for which cars will be used. And a discussion, which tracks should be in.

Since the real Formula One became a pretty boring thing to watch, you may stay at your keyboard and enjoy some time with the world's best community's members instead.

EPIC Quintana

Nairo Quintana did not only impress in the (real) stage up Alp d'Huez, he also crushed the competition in the EPIC Giro del Trentino. A clean sweap eventually, as the premium climber took out all four individual classifications. Beating EPIC rider Cristiano De las Campos (Euskaltel) and Franco Pellizotti (Cofidis) by almost five minutes, there's no question about how deserved this victory might have been.

Epic Schleck

Andy Schleck did not only impress in... well, wait.. Andy Schleck took out the ManGame's first Grand Tour - the Giro d'Italia 2015. In a thrilling battle for pink, the veteran took the race-lead on the penultimate day, where a long leading Riccardo Ricco (Festina) totally cracked to drop down to 4th in the GC. Schleck won by 46 seconds on Angel Madrazo (Quickstep), while Giro legend Damiano Cunego (Meiji) completed the podium. In the ManGame, Andy Schleck has now won all GTs at least once. Don't let the real Andy know this.

A busy week saw a few more notable winners then: Taylor Phinney (Venchi) brought home his fourth overall victory of the Tour of California, beating an unlucky Simon Spilak (Festina) by just 5 seconds. In the PCT, Luis Leon Sanchez (Evonik) took out the Tour of Romandie and Maxime Monfort (Gazelle) the Tour of South Africa. Monfort going for a 100% winning quote so far this season.

Thread of the Week

Other Races 2015 - just because I enjoyed a few posts there.

Category: Story (DFL by SportingNonsense, PCM07)

Giro d'Italia 2010: the DFL - Cyclingnews - Litespeed Team (in it's fourth year at this time) enters the race with Cadel Evans as it's leader and Edvald Boasson Hagen as their main sprinter. The Norwegian had already stage-wins from Le Tour and La Vuelta in his bags (as well as a points classification each). And while Evans would miss out on a bigger result (9th in the GC eventually), "Eddy the Boss" made himself a GT-legend. Collecting 4 stage-wins (from a total 7 for DFL) and comfortably winning his third GT-points jersey!

In probably the longest running In-story Grand Tour ever (starting to report the race in 2011, finishing it off in 2014), Yaroslav Popovych did take the overall primes for Lampre. Go check this award-winning piece of writing (Team story of the year 2008).

The SKY is the strongest, else is just chatter - udoi (Sky Doping/Hate Thread)

And the winner is...

After fjhoekie won the first of three free PCM15 copies through our PCMDaily contests last week, we can now announce the two members, who did a great job not buying the game on first hand: alexkr00 took the One of Four contest, beating runner-up dark_x2012 and SSJ2Luigi in the game deciding tie-break! Special mention to fjhoekie, who was amongst the final four (again).

The third copy goes to cio93, who finished the PCMDaily Velogames as fifth overall. Opposing to the overall winner Lord Di Lego, cio showed the needed activity in the Velogames and Tour related threads in our forums and earned the price that way. Enjoy your time now, guys.

Shirts and Stages for PCM15

Quite a lot of (new) threads in the Graphics forum for PCM15: Graphics by Tatone91 may be worth a look, coming up with a few good looking shirts and some unique 'fake photos' for cyclists. K01 Graphics | Country Flags Pack in progress announced an interesting project (his thread title should be self-explaining). #Саша# Cycling Jersey Shop by perot is another new thread with a pretty cool shirt as it's first showing. Also reblaus Jerseys has seen some good activity most recently. If you are looking for fantasy shirts, there's quite some places to visit right now.

We've also seen some stagemakers active last week: a Benelux Tour Cobble GT is underway, made by trekbmc. stardrummer91 stages started with the Tour of Berlin (U23) and already released a new fantasy classic based in Germany. Not a fan of promoting myself, but also tsmoha's stages | Tour of Southern Africa comes up with a fantasy Grand Tour.

Stories on several platforms

In a week still dominated by the real action in France, we still noticed some good activity in the story sections: The Two of Us | Chapter 2 by Ian Superstar (Butler&Mre) and Life in Obscurity: the story of a small Continental team by Ollie23 feature two rather unique approaches. Nairo Quintana|2015 - Stage Races Begin by Jakstar22 and The Fight For Green - A Sprinter's Story from the_hoyle (both PCM13) as two more stories worth to follow (probably).

Another beloved star from the real Tour is featured in a story from DiCyc: Peter Sagan - The Dream for the Green is played on the Tour de France 2011 console game and if you want to see a young Sagan challenging for green, it's now time to follow, as the story already reached the first stage of the TdF now.

ManGame Madness

The Giro d'Italia and Tour of California are both underway - with Team Festina leading both events at the moment (Ricco in Italy, Spilak in the US). A few days before, Sam Bewley continued to win as he wants to: the Kiwi completed a San Remo - Ronde - Roubaix triple!

A thrilling Tour of Vancouver was won by Alberto Contador (Bonsucro), who took the overall victory in a concluding TTT. The cobbled KBC De Panne Tour saw Danny Summerhill (Azteca) adding another win to his season palmares.

Weekly Tour

It's all over now. Froome. So much hate, but also quite some entertaining racing.

Thread of the Week

PCMdaily DB Stat Discussion - PCM15. The annual post-Tour debate about Quintana's resistance, Froome's whatever and so on.

Category: ManGame (Tour de France 2007, ProTour)

Winning the Tour de France as a French rider with a French team? We're too young for such a thing to happen, ain't we? Well, sort of. But not all of us.. Almost eight years back from now, the ManGame held it's first ever Tour de France. Robbie McEwen would take out six stages (including the first four road stages). Alessandro Petacchi went to win two - with the prestigious victory on Champs-Élysées. Thomas Dekker dominated the first week with three victories to finish 9th in the final GC.. so far, so good.

Christophe Moreau (Bouygues Telecom)? Would take the maillot jaune in the final timetrial on the penultimate day! While Alexandre Vinokourov (T-Mobile) looked set to take the overall victory, the Kazakh struggled in the final mountain stage to lose a minute on Moreau and some other favorites. Entering the final timetrial with a 17 seconds advantage on Moreau, our well beloved Vino would then indeed gave away yellow:

Check 1: Moreau has 9 seconds on Vinokourov. Vino still has Yellow by 8 seconds.
Check 2: Moreau has 18 seconds on Vinokourov. Moreau now has yellow by 1 second.
Finish: Moreau has 23 seconds on Vinokourov. Moreau will be in yellow on the Champs Elysses - by 6 seconds.

A thrilling first Tour in the ManGame. Levi Leipheimer (Team Milram) completed the podium and all fans of French cycling would probably do bad things to make such a thing happening in real life, won't you?

Don't you guys have nothing better to do than talking about this? - dienblad (Sky Doping/Hate Thread)

fjhoekie wins first free PCM15 copy

The first of three PCM15 Contests run by PCMDaily goes to fjhoekie, who took out the Tour's Round #1 "One of Four Betting" contest. As six members went for a tie in the original score, the winner was then found through a bonus round - which fjhoekie narrowly took ahead of Strydz. You still have the chance to join the second round.

In the third contest to win a free copy, we see 'DiLego Superstars' leading ahead of cio93's 'Team Puma - SAP'. Lord di Lego's team is Froome, Valverde, Rodriguez, Meintjes, Sagan, Gallopin, Elmiger, Haas, Degenkolb. Rorosaur's Riders (about 400pts off DiLego, currently sitting on 6th place) is the only other team in the Top-10, that has Froome in it.

Forum Post Ratings system added

The biggest news this week was certainly the addition of a rating system for individual posts in the forum. In case anyone has missed it, check the news section for the article. Please note, that "these ratings will be trialled on the site, to see how they go - but there's plenty of potential for the system to be expanded in future."

ZABELD! SO MUCH YES! - SSJ2Luigi

One big dislike to this system. - Avin Wargunnson

Additions to the download section

One of the site's biggest downloads has seen an update this week: Jacky Durands PCM Sponsorkits 2015 Version 2.0 is now available, fixing some known bugs from his previous version, as well as updating the Tour de France sponsorkit and other races' mountain/sprint signs.

The RSM forum (biggest German PCM community) came up with RSM-news DB 2015 Version 0.4, where you can choose from 103 teams (12 from the USA) and 308 races.

Games, games, games!

Non-cycling (forum) games used to go strong from time to time and so did this one in the past few years: the Fantasy NFL: Season 2015 has been launched by jseadog1 (who hasn't been posting in his Running journal this week though)! If you're interested in American Football and enjoy those Fantasy games, go check the thread and find all informations you need to join the PCMDaily community there. Previous winners of this game, that has been run since 2010: valverde321, DJP19, jseadog1, baseballover312 and defending champion madzdaman.

Still some spots open (15, to be precisive).

New PCM.daily Initiave underway

Do you remember... when Geraint Thomas became a world class climber?

With the last week's biggest news (site updates, Le Tour) becoming usual business for most of us, it's about time to announce a new initiative, that will be kicked off at some point this week: the news section will see a new addition, in which we will look back at some of our community's greatest, smallest, best, funniest (and so on) moments!

This Remember when... section will feature short articles on things such as PCM Stories, ManGame highlights, "forgotten" members, famous stagemakers and stuff like that. We won't not just present former PCMDaily Award winners (like me), but also less known things, that some of you might still remember.

Weekly Tour

Porte-Thomas-Froome and a certain thread comes alive. 2agan. Greipel makes it three. Nibali won't win. Schweinsteiger joins ManUtd.

The thing about Sky that gets me is mostly Brailsford - Movistar

That's Sir Brailsford to you! - Eden95

According to spectators it was Heineken and not urine - deek12345

Same difference - SlickMongoose

Thread of the Week

Easy choice: Sky Doping/Hate Thread. As soon as those Sky guys crushed the competition on the first summit finish, we would see this annual discussion heating up once again. An enjoyable place to visit.