New York and Washington DC have been made for Tour de France Grand Départ on Pro Cycling Manager

One of the users of the popular cycling PC game, Pro Cycling Manager, has built the landscape of New York and Washington DC, to allow the cities to host the 2024 Tour de France Grand Départ in the game.

The computerised cities were demonstrated in a recent video by YouTuber Benji Naesen in his career with Italian team, EOLO-Kometa.

The race started with a 16.99km individual time trial around the city centre, taking in the likes of the Guggenheim Museum, Central Park West as well as some of the city's biggest skyscrapers.

The next stage was also around 187.1km NYC with an intermediate sprint just outside of Manhattan and a King of the Mountains point on Fort George Hill both coming in the second half of the stage.

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After that it's yet another sprinters stage from Philadelphia, where it was indeed as sunny as the TV show suggests, to the capital city of Washington DC over 221.3km. And no, the race doesn't finish outside the White House sadly. There is an intermediate sprint in Baltimore, though.

Of course this route would be near impossible in real life, so why not live it in the world of PCM.

The full route is available to view on La Flamme Rouge where the original was designed back in 2015.

The joy of PCM is that users can easily make mods and create completely new routes with amazing details, making it look as realistic as possible.

Unfortunately, the riders faces as well as the fans aren't particularly realistic, but this game doesn't have the budget of a game like FIFA 22 or GTA for example.

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The individual behind making this pack for PCM is also one of the people behind the well known page of La Flamme Rouge (LFR), Emmea90 told Cycling Weekly that he used a site called Track4Bikers when he started making these routes but now does it himself, thus creating LFR.

"Then you have the hard part. Because once you've got a good route design, you have to make it for PCM.

"From the editor you can export Garmin GPXs that the tool that PCM provides for designing stages can read. All you get on the tool is basically the GPX black line and if you have a stage editor version for developers, the Google maps as background

"Then you have to just use the editor provided by the game and draw the stage, that it's a long process, can be also from three to six hours per stage.

"These routes are usually released on the packs that are in the steam workshop of the games."

There is also a PCM World Cup at the end of the year online, where around 150 people come together to compete in races. There are also packs that allow you to race in the women's peloton as well as go back in time with some of the legendary riders and kits of the past.

The original layout for New York was made in 2013 by Le Guppetto user Leon40.

I should know how fun this game is seen as though, since mid-2016, I've roughly played a pretty ridiculous one and a half years on this game once hours played are calculated. Although, I would like to stress I do sometimes just leave it on as it also keeps the laptop awake.