The Tour of California was always going to be a difficult race on Velo Games. Bogdan had discovered our secret tactic, “always take Sagan”, so it was up to the team to perform in other ways.
That started well with Tejay Van Garderen taking the race lead in the early stages. But he crashed on stage four and ended up 54 seconds down. It seems like it was all over. But hours after the race had finished, the officials announced that as Van Garderen had made it back to the bunch before being held up by another crash, he would be awarded the same time as the main peloton.
This made no sense. He was off the back because of his own mistake and the crash he got caught behind was outside of the 3km cut-off, which is where the rule comes into effect. But there is no appeal process so the stupid decision stood.
After all of that, it didn’t matter too much: the next day was in the high mountains and Van Garderen cracked again. Worse still, Uran, who I also had because I thought he would be EF Education First’s other GC contender, then went back to help Van Garderen, clearing the way for others to win the stage.
Luckily for me, the eventual winner, Tadej PogaÄar, wasn’t in anyone else’s team either, and the highest placed rider on the day was one of mine: George Bennett. EF Education First held onto the team classification, giving a juicy bonus to three of my riders.
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Tags: cycling, fantasy cycling
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 28th, 2019 at 11:00 am and is filed under Distractions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.