Some additional context for those who don't follow professional cycling: the Dutch women's team was incredibly strong coming into this road race. All 4 riders on their team are stars in their own right, and the only reason there wasn't a clear favorite for the race overall is that people weren't sure which Dutch rider would win.
So you have a complicated group dynamic, where the majority of the peloton has no interest in pulling the group to catch the break, since they would just get beat by one or more of the Dutch riders, and the Dutch riders didn't seem to have a clear plan on how to control the race and who would sacrifice their chances and work on the front for the rest of the team.
As others have said, there were no radios allowed for riders in the race, so all information about the breakaway came from the race director's car trailing the peloton. This was a well known fact about the race coming in, and it's the same way that the annual World Championship race is run. It's normal for riders to drop back to the team car to get information about the break, and the lead moto for a group of cyclists will occasionally show time gaps on a whiteboard.
At least one of the Dutch riders claimed to have known about the lone rider off the front [1], but somehow that information didn't make it to the rest of the team. It seems that most of the peloton didn't know (or didn't care) how many riders were up the road, and the Dutch team failed to communicate amongst themselves and establish a plan.
All that leads to Kiesenhofer's solo move working out. All credit to her for an extremely strong ride.
What I've read, Kiesenhofer would have preferred to race the time trial instead of the the road race, she even told that the austrian press just before the race. A breakout gives you the advantage of riding your own pace at our optimal and constant power level; something a you can't in a breakout group where the the lead does cycle and goes from hundrets watts to almost zero and back again. I guess it's partly due to her not being a professional (anymore), thus not having to deal with team trainings and training mostly on her own? Not sure on that.
But there was luck involved, and in 99% of the cases, it’d be terrible advice and strategy to count on a major communications breakdown within the team of top favorites and (apparently) within the organization of the race themselves?
“Strategy” is one of those words that’s used way too much in hindsight.
In any other sport, being ahead of the favourite by a wide margin for much of a race, then crossing the finishing line so far ahead that the second-place athlete isn't even in view, would be called a "resounding victory" rather than "lucky"
She was at least 40km alone in the wind. There she needed 20-30% more energy then the riders in the peleton. So this was a incredible performance while the peleton calculated wrong.
Exactly, she was one of many underdog competitors, best bet for her is not a good one, but it can work, get in a break and hope for screw ups behind. That doesn't get you a win very often, but its not very rare either.
Road cycling is one of the sports where giving luck room to happen is a perfectly legitimate part of the game. Did others have a better hand? Maybe, but they failed to play it.
They still shouldn't have given the breakaway 10 minutes in a race as hard to control as this (with teams of 4).
In the men's race, the favourite teams (Belgium and Slovenia) sacrificed riders earlier (Greg van Avermaet and Jan Tratnik respectively) to maintain the breakaway on a leash. The dutch women were arrogant and they paid for it.
Breaks are rarely a winning strategy (on mountains they are, but those are a pure display of strength and will-power). Granted she is a mathematician and might be literate in road racing strategy but I'm sure a lot of that strategy is down to experience which she doesn't have.
When you’re extremely unlikely to win by conventional means then a high variance strategy is the best way to maximize your chances of winning. Sure, if you play this race out 50 times maybe she only wins 1 time by breaking away and hoping other riders flub up their response. But what were her odds of winning by staying with the peloton? 1/100? 1/200?
As you said, she’s a mathematician - she knew exactly what she was doing.
This is part of what makes road racing so much fun to watch. You need to be strong to win, but it's not just a pure contest of who can put out the most watts per kilogram. Tactics - and some luck - play a factor too.
Tactics are a measure of who knows at what time to put out how many watts per kilo.
What happens in road racing is politics. Domestiques grouping up at a leisurely pace to finish a climb stage just under the time limit, celebrities holding the team car by a sticky water bottle to catch back up to the group that dropped them, taking it easy for the first part of the race until a race leader says "let's go", and not attacking while someone important stops to pee, when their extra-efficient, extra-fragile tires puncture, or they get tired and downshift at a bad time and drop a chain or something.
I understand that being 1% faster in a sport where your opponent can save 33% of his energy by drafting doesn't make a win a sure thing. But cyclists have spent a century drafting ever more unusual unwritten rules and it's become more about the politics than the pedaling.
Wow, that's really something to see. Was there ever any discussion of what the rest of the pack was thinking? Did they think Coburn was going to be unable to keep the pace and they'd real her in, or what?
It’s not like men don’t make errors, even at this level – the entire point is pushing people to their absolute limit. The more interesting lesson for anyone not peddling an agenda is the importance of training exactly as the main event will happen – national teams usually have limited experience together and not having radios meant that the riders were guessing about details they normally know far more precisely.
Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines so we don't have to ban you again? Your substantive comments are good but the amount of flamebait you toss in is abusive, and the damage you cause by that exceeds the value of the good stuff by a lot.
We're trying to have a forum that doesn't destroy itself [1, 2]—if you'd like to contribute to that, you're welcome here, but as long as you're adding to the self-destructive tendencies (which are the way things go by default on the internet and hardly need you or anyone else to nudge them), you're not.
Totally unopposed, except for the part where they caught 2 of the 3 riders? Nobody is arguing that it wasn’t an error but that happens regularly — everyone is making strategic and tactical decisions while riding at a high fraction of their maximum heart rate, and there was clearly a communications breakdown based on the claim that Van Vleuten and Van der Breggen had been told that Plichta was the last. Mistakes under pressure are not gender-specific.
The fuck up was not riders most likely but DS. Someone did not bother to look at the damn TV and count people in the break and who they were.. someone did not communicate this absolutely crucial info to whoever was the Dutch road captain. Did they not have a system of when to go to the DS car?? I mean you get food and water there lol How?
It is a fuckup of astronomical proportions. Break wins all the time but I can’t think of a single race that I seen where Peloton did not realize that there was someone up the road. They had A LOT of time to catch her, they could easily do it. Yet they blew it
The Olympics as envisioned by Coubertin didn't allow professionals for a very long time, A VERY LONG TIME. For boxers this year is actually the first Olympics that do accept professionals.
Curiously, every single soviet sports athlete who ever competed on any international event was considered an amateur, while in fact being a full time professional devoted to his sport.
Usually they were officially 'working' at some factory, but were members of a sports club and received a substantial stipend, never doing any work but training and competing. This practice still lives in Russia. The income of any Olympics team russian athlete is estimated to be no less than 5-7k USD, generally coming in the form of several grants and stipends.
It's the same for most countries, Germany has the Sportsoldat, employed by the military (and even more employed by the police) and they make up the majority of the German Olympic team. Not everyone likes this in Germany, but there's not much of an alternative in sight.
The American U.S. Army World Class Athlete Program is tiny compared to the German practise.
This sounds rather idealistic and doesn't represent the reality, particularly for this female cycling race! The top competitors of Anna Kiesenhofer had professional contracts!
Yes, but this is a huge part of the history of the Olympics. The Dream Team in 1992, athletes who worked for their governments (and just trained full-time) in the 70s, athletes living an impoverished life for years while chasing their Olympic dreams (see Steve Prefontaine working as a bartender).
She did not earn her money with cycling. Last year, her proffesion was Mathematics teacher. She was also far from a favorite for this race.
She spent one year in a proffesional group. The commentators were saying she really dislikes riding in 'the bunch'. Which would make proffesional cycling hard.
She qualified through national championships, which are open to non-proffesionals.
As for invisibility, the person who came second thought they were first. So somehow they missed this. And she wasn't the only one who didn't know there was still someone ahead.
Non of this is meant to say Kiesenhofer did not deserve this. She rode an amazing race, and earned this gold medal.
Notably, 15% of men riding in the tour de France earn less than 45000 a year. That isn't a low salary, but for a proffesional athlete at the peak event, it isn't a lot either.
As you can also read in the linked article, she broke away with some others, as is usual in cycling. After a while the peloton caught up with the breakaways, thinking they're now racing for the lead. But they didn't realise Anna Kiesenhofer wasn't among them, as she is a virtually unknown amateur, so nobody missed her.
Excuse us, she never was an virtually unknown amateur. 2017 she got a professional contract from a Belgian team, but refused to cycle on their "stupid" rules. She rather went by her own rules, without a team and didn't need the money. 2018 she was 5th in the European time trials. She constantly rode, but not so much on professional UCI events, but also on many amateur marathon events. Which she thought were harder and better. She was official Austrian champion afterall.
The peloton just missed her, due to complete lack of communication amongst the disfunctional leading dutch team. There were many dutch and other coaches on the street with cellphones, but they didn't try to catch her, so she was lucky. A properly organized peloton would have caught her easily. You could see with your own eyes how disorganized the peloton was. Extremely interesting case for social studies.
Yeah, I don't mean to discredit her. Just saying the peloton didn't think of her as they caught up with the front runners, as they didn't really know her. Exactly for the reason you state: she didn't attend a whole lot of pro events.
Is it possible that an outlier, an amateur, a lone wolf, was able for a moment to draw the strength and determination that would lead to victory and not even the best in the world stood a chance.
Of is as you say....she was lucky and her victory was just a series of unfortunate circumstances for the other riders. I want to believe that there was no one that day that could beat her.
It would be nice to believe, but when second place celebrates like she won says she wasn't aware of a rider up the road, it's not just not the story today. Perhaps if they had known and chased, Kiesenhofer still would have been able to hold them off, but we'll never know.
I also wouldn't call the rest of the peloton "unfortunate." They knew keeping track of the breakaway would be especially important given the lack of radio communication with a director in a team car, and they still didn't. I think Kiesenhofer deserves a ton of credit for this win; she was in the break from the very start of the race, and she was solo for over an hour, I believe. You can't do that without a lot of dedicated training and preparation. If anything, I think this is an example of "shoot your shot." You never know when things will break your way!
Part of the reason I love cycling races is that it's a combination of athletic ability and strategic thinking that you don't see in most other sports. The physics of drafting mean that a well coordinated group almost always has the speed advantage over a lone rider, but lone riders often win races because they don't have to deal with the coordination problems of a group. After 4+ hours of racing, people are trying to calculate optimal game theory decisions while at their max heart rate. It can be bonkers to watch!
If you can manage to pull away when the front of the pack is dominated by people with no chance, then it can be hard to catch. Part of the chess match in cycling is keeping your friends close but your enemies closer. If you can catch a draft off of the person making a break, you burn far less energy than they do. If you’re trying to reel them in then you’ve won. Otherwise if you can’t beat em, join em.
This is why relative unknowns often break away. Especially as a professional. Nobody was watching Pedro Noname, but now the sponsors and recruiters know his name. Even if he doesn’t win, he’s gotten a good story and better prospects.
In this case it sounds like communication was bad and so if you didn’t see her break away then some people didn’t know she was gone. Or vastly underestimated her.
A few months ago on my usual round I (6'3", 103kg) by chance teamed up with a much smaller woman. I felt the draft effet even when I was behind her rather small statue, and it was a fun and quick ride. Then came a bus of five riders working even better then we did and they went by at an incredible speed. Since then I humbly accept that breakouts winning a race is rare.
On nearly level terrain the peloton has a distinct aerodynamic advantage that lets them reel in most people who are just having a good day. People try it anyway and hope for bad luck, or leverage time bonuses if the rules allow it.
Big groups on a downhill are dangerous, on an uphill are too hot and cramped and so in both cases individual skill and power are outsized. If a technical downhill racer can break away on the last climb, they may be gone for the day. Tours have been lost or won on this tactic.
In a multi day tour a twelfth place competitor might pull away, even take a few people with them. The other teams may not be interested in catching, might have lesser members in the breakaway and be hedging their bets, so they can’t build consensus on burning their people to kick up the pace. They make think that they can wait for him to wear out and reel him in later, but there comes a point where from one update to the next they discover he’s still gaining on them, and oh shit do we still have time to catch? We better find out.
The worst for me is when they catch the breakaway mere miles from the finish line. Sometimes a person stays away all day only to end up finishing in the group, or at least beaten by all the sprinters.
> The worst for me is when they catch the breakaway mere miles from the finish line. Sometimes a person stays away all day only to end up finishing in the group, or at least beaten by all the sprinters.
Yeah, this is why I (and most others, I believe) find most of the sprint stages in the Tour pretty boring. The break vs. peloton dynamic is critical for road races to work (e.g. if there's no one up the road, why don't we all just ride along at 25kph?), but in those flat stages, the sprint teams are so good and care so much about the sprint finish that it's almost a guarantee they catch the break.
When they added the time bonus to the point system I was not sure it was a good thing. But sometimes a third place climbed to second or first cemented a bigger lead by staying out front for 2/3 of the race and then finishing with the pack. Especially if they could pull it off twice
There's always someone who can beat you. It doesn't matter - they didn't. What matters is that she chose and executed her best-chance prep and race day strategies wisely and bravely. It takes away nothing from her achievement that she also happened to hit the one outer she needed on the river
Fantastic ride and if you follower her Twitter she's been doing a lot of very detailed exploration of her endurance limits in preparation.
When the lead group fell to 3 they had an 11 minute lead.
She broke free and went solo with 40km to go.
When she finished that lead had eroded to 2 minutes as the front group she dropped had been caught.
So in those 40km she lost 9 minutes of lead she had built with the help of the breakout group.
This was all strategy and then a tremendous physical performance on her part.
Dutch team needs a serious kick in the ass for underestimating an "amatuer" in this regard. It was obvious she was in it for the gold or nothing; and they fatally assumed it would be the later.
Fantastic win when you consider training, strategy, and performance all came together to pull it off. This is what olympians are all about!
I heard something early on about a communication failure, not sure how much truth there is in that.
Nonetheless, it was an incredible performance - right down to her collapsing to the ground victorious in tears at the line.
I laughed a little when I saw the Danish competitor come to congratulate her with a big smile while the Dutch team two meters away wouldn’t even acknowledge she was there - no point being bitter about it afterwards when you’ve already been beaten that badly by a “nobody”. I wasn’t even sure if Anna even realised because she was so exhausted (and elated!).
Totally agree! Look at her bike, tires, wheels, the ceramic speed jockey wheels, her jersey, her helmet, her training. It was all set up for that last 40km. She executed what she planned perfectly, everybody else made a mistake. That played in her favor, true, but the strategy was there, using her strengths which suited the course with this tactics. Leaving the break with 40km to go, set up the rest of the break as a bait. She assumed, that the lack of radios may cause a miscommunication with rather high probability, buying her some time. She may not imagined 11 minutes, but she is good at downhill and TT, so it could work, and it did. Brains, guts and lots and lots of power, well done Anna!
(More related to the comments than the article) I've seen tons of takes on this since watching the end of the race this morning and, although it certainly played a part in deciding the outcome, it's a shame that more focus has seemed to be on making excuses or how the Dutch riders messed things up instead of Dr Kiesenhofer's incredible story and ride.
Kiesenhofer was on a fantastic day: van Vleuten's earlier attack from the peloton made no inroads to Kiesenhofer, assuming the time gaps shown on the TV were correct.
Watching on the TV we knew there was still a rider out front and, even if the race "ardoisier" (blackboard holder) wasn't the best, team management should have figured out a way to get that information to the chasing pack. I mean, the race finished on a motor racing circuit with pit lanes containing team helpers! It's not like it was like stage 16 of this year's Giro, where poor weather stopped race images being broadcast[1].
Oh, "they" knew. Cyclists talk amongst themselves. Shapira and Plichta fell back to the peloton and they knew.
Not everyone knew, but then they let a group break away and build an 11 minute lead at one point. If you weren't keeping track of every rider in that group you are probably just trying to hang on to make a play amongst the rider left around around you later and not thinking about Gold.
In giro they have radio communications from the team manager. In the Olympics they don't have that, they can't tell them the differences.
Also winning when the opponents are not really trying to catch you it's not really a story either. It happens a lot even when they know a rider is upfront in order to save energy for second place and not give a free ride to other cyclists -see how Carapaz won in men events where only Wout tried to catch him.
The real story is the mistake from the dutch team that could have catch her but missinterpreted the situation.
This isn't the first time something like this has happened: cycling aficionados will remember the tale of Robert Millar and the "stolen" 1984 Vuelta [1].
I personally love it when races are run without radios. The UCI tried to ban them in 2010 but the pro teams rebelled, claiming that they were essential for safety reasons; the number of crashes at the 2021 Tour de France would suggest that they aren't succeeding very well at that core function.
Radios make the races formulaic. Not necessarily predictable but certainly a different event. I can't think of any other sport where pros are held to different rules (i.e. allowed technical assistance) compared to amateurs.
> I personally love it when races are run without radios
I agree wholeheartedly.
It levels the playing field in a way that means money can't interfere as much. Some people make a break off the front? You have to remember how many people went and how good they are. You want to make sure they don't get too far away? Chase them.
Cycling fans (of which I am one) make a lot of noise about how they enjoy the strategy involved, but there are different kinds of strategy. There's nothing I dislike more than a few people making a breakaway and the peloton sauntering along, knowing that they'll be able to catch the break within X kilometres of the finish if they make Y effort at Z kilometres out because they know exactly where the breakaway is. People wax lyrical about heroic individual deeds and head-to-head competition of the past. You want more of that? Ban radios.
The whole safety argument is bunk from what I've read of it - the amount of cameras and personnel on the course is more than enough to catch any issues.
Because otherwise the Olympics for road cycling and actual high-level road cycling races become totally different things.
The entire game of road cycling races is based on judging these gaps. Without it, you would probably never let anyone ride off. Then races become attrition, followed by sprint.
Either that or you get a weird spotting system where people try to get gap timings to the riders through unofficial channels. Probably from the broadcast, but if delayed too much, from physical spotters with stopwatches.
I'm talking about the whole of cycling, not just the Olympics, so the first point doesn't stand.
Do you really prefer the spectacle of the peloton letting a breakaway head off into the distance, knowing that in 95% of cases they can just reel it back in just enough not to have an effect on the GC? Today just showed how exciting it is when people can head off down the road far enough for the others not to know what's going on. I think on balance I prefer attrition followed by sprint, although I'd contend that's a micharacterisation of what would actually happen.
Besides, isn't that exactly what the TDF used to be and what turned it into the best cycling race in the world? This year's TDF at least gave us a glimpse of what it could be like when someone rips up the rule book and the Sky train doesn't optimise the entire race into irrelevance.
I also think that there are enough cameras around to stop unofficial channels. And who's to say whether the person on the roadside is someone who's for you and giving you good information or against you and feeding you lies?
I think that you can do a lot against the 'optimized races' by giving riders the timing info reliably _without_ giving them radio communications with their teams.
I also think that currently, the races are actually quite fun. Even in the sky times in the TDF, there were breakaways with a chance, there were people who would solo to a victory.
I don't think unofficial channels are ever going to be policeable. Obfuscation is too potent. And I don't think it would be interesting if teams start competing to be better at getting their riders extra info. Even though I think its quite fun to try to design such systems.
A road race involves people traveling over dozens of kilometers, with many spectators lining the streets. There are so many ways a spectator can signal something to a rider in code (color of hat, waving or not waving a flag / choosing what flag, shouting something as they pass, etc.).
Sometimes a spectator might just say something about "oh that group a couple minutes before you looked fast" and not even be part of a team.
Before radio you had a moto putting the latest gap to display in front of the peloton. This is very simple and would not cause trouble. Note that they do not have that for the Olympic games for some reason.
Wrong. Anna was constantly informed by the moto of her lead. We will have to hear from others, like Longo or Brennauer if there were informed or not. But I'm pretty sure they were.
This is incredible, but some of the headlines of "amateur wins gold versus pros" are a little misleading.
She was with a pro-team, she is the current Austrian time-trial champion and had devoted herself to making this happen over the pandemic. Meanwhile the Dutch World Champion didn't know she was ahead, so didn't chase her.
I love the story, but it isn't a simple amateur beating out all the pros story.
Only in 2017. She quit a Belgian pro-team shortly after she joined [1].
Quote from the linked article: "I noticed that professional sport is too much physical and psychological stress for me and that I prefer to only do hobby sport"
> but it isn't a simple amateur beating out all the pros story.
IMHO she probably is not really just an amateur, but also not a pro. I mean, she is 30, doing her post-doc at EPFL Lausanne right now... It's not like training is the only thing she spends her time with. Also not sure if she has sponsors.
And to everyone here on HN saying that the Dutch riders didn't know there was someone in front: These are professional athletes, competing at the olympics. If the Dutch's claim is true, it's their own fault. Knowing who is/how many are in front is part of the game. And they lost that game.
Also Kiesenhofer was ahead 1:15 minutes. It's not like that's nothing. Even if the Dutch would have chased her, is it sure they would have beaten her? I am not sure...
It is definitely the mistake of the dutch riders, and the dutch team. From reports, it might also be issue with communication between the organization and the dutch team.
There were complaints about unclarity of information for the riders. If true that probably is something the organization to do better. But 'our girls' could have done better.
My read is that: being used to having communication; hubris and situational awareness mistakes; unclear signaling of gaps to the riders; and a spotty cell connection in the coach's car combined to the Dutch riders making a very bad mistake.
What would have happened without this mistake is an unkowanle what-if. My money would be on Kiesemhofer having been caught, given how quickly the gap was shrinking at the end. But that what if doesn't matter as much as the huge mistake that prevented it from materializing.
I think it is fair. Compared to the Dutch, she was an amateur. No coaching and no funding. All of her training was solo. That should have put her at a disadvantage.
It seems to me like she has the passion and drive for time trialing, not really road racing. It's hard to do that for money, and she is apparently driven and lucky enough to be able to have a job but still train like a pro.
I left the PDE group as a postdoc a few months before she joined. This even further solidifies that I wasn’t quite cut out for that level of mathematics… haha.
This was what I came into the comments to find out! I like that the faculty is 'celebrating her result,' a phrase we often use for new discoveries and theorems, rather than race placements.
I got excited when I saw 'Catalan' in the original article, but, sadly, as she's in PDE research, she's merely from Catalan, not studying Catalan numbers.
> I got excited when I saw 'Catalan' in the original article, but, sadly, as she's in PDE research, she's merely (...)
angry Catalan noises
I'm really happy for her, she did her PhD at my alma mater, in a rather well-known lab. Here's one of the main papers leading to the doctorate: https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.02605
Being a pro athlete competing and winning at an event like Olympics and pursing a post doc in a tough field like mathematics is an achievement lot more interesting than whether she is really amateur
Don't know where to add it to so I'll add it in response to the OP as some discussion is about it:
Quotation from the Dutch TV (interview with van Vleuten, silver medal winner) [1]:
> "Onderschatting van de tegenstander, in combinatie met heel veel miscommunicatie en ook slechte communicatie vanuit de organisatie."
Which roughly translates to () is mine: "Underestimated the opposition (singular), in combination with lots of miscommunication and bad communication (with the team) from the organization."
Though it looked like she was contend with the performance of Anna Kiesenhofer vs her eventual performance.
Especially with global warming I wish they took climate into more account with deciding locations. It becomes borderline unsafe I think the US track trials were too hot if I remember right?
For training though the US climbers have a small space in their gym that is enclosed in plastic with heater humidifiers for this reason. pretty funny.
Temps + humidity - or 'condies' as the kids say - are really important to climb at the top level. Cold and a breeze is usually best.
I’m curious how much the extra year has helped some athletes who wouldn’t have won or might not have won until 2024. Or given a few the extra time to show they can compete.
For ex: an 18yr old Tunisian was a big upset for gold at 400m swimming.
The extra year was also a year with less competition. That probably allowed some people to train up without being noticed.
Normally it would have been noticed how much they improved in the past year in competition. Without competition, you don't know how people progressed the last year.
"After Shapira and Plichta were caught by the remainder of the peloton the rest of the riders seemed to believe that they were racing amongst themselves for Gold, unaware that Kiesenhofer was still in front."
Not saying she shouldn't had won, but when nobody is pursuing you, it is much easier to win.
We have seen in the men race that even when people know there is one person in front, 80% of the riders prefer not to force to prevent the strongest guy of the group to win the sprint. (Who won the sprint anyway)
No, the rules are pretty simple. The one who manages to first cross the finish line wins. Everybody knows the rules.
The problem is it is not a very simple sport and there is some game theory involved. Riding as fast as possible is not the best strategy, actually it is pretty poor one.
The better strategy comes from understanding you don't need to win by a lot, winning by 1s is the same as winning by 10 minutes. Also riding alone or at the front costs a lot more effort than riding behind somebody.
Actually, riding at the same speed at the front might be max effort and in the pack might be almost coasting.
Together, this means you may have a very valid strategy to try to preserve energy (ie. keep with the pack) and count on your better ability to sprint at the end to get ahead of competitors. That of course as long as you believe there is nobody running away.
At the extreme of effort, very small differences of effort can have very large effects on your body. If you look at it, a difference of tempo to run a 5k and 10k is very small.
The current world records for 5k is 12:35.36 and 10k is 26:11.00.
If you look at difference, 5k is 151s/km while 10k is 156s/km, just 5s or 3% slower.
And yet that minute difference lets you run twice as far.
In professional cycling the Ride as Hard as You Can people are necessary but often don’t achieve any real rank on the team. They might not even finish a tour, either having not budgeted enough for the late stages, or being so new that they can’t understand how tired they’re gonna be later.
Their claim to fame may be limited to being on the top team, it might be being on a top 5 team. If you’re lucky you team may place several people in the top 10. If you’re their hedge against the captain being injured, that might even be your name in seventh place.
Lemond is famous in small part for being number #2 to Bernard Hinault and feeling it should have been him on the podium.
But Lemond is the classic case of the unreliable captain. He was like a race horse. On a good day he was like the wind. But a stiff breeze could lay him up. He lamented the Hinault situation but illness stopped him from winning two others. And then that goddamned duck hunting trip… (I met him a few years later, he did a signing at a bike shop owned by a friend… who he as going to go duck hunting with the next day. I so wanted to ask him why he was crazy.)
I never felt he had the sort of lieutenants that Armstrong enjoyed, the way he was to Hinault. I’m racking my brain trying to remember who was on Delgado’s team and coming up completely blank. But I think that just proves my point.
Oops. Seems I have flipped Delgado and Indurain in my head. Which I should have realized when the wikipedia page seemed to be understating his win history.
> In professional cycling the Ride as Hard as You Can people are necessary but often don’t achieve any real rank on the team. They might not even finish a tour, either having not budgeted enough for the late stages, or being so new that they can’t understand how tired they’re gonna be later.
I am not much interested in cycling, but I understand this is the dimension that is not present on Olympics. Or do they also ride as teams and assign from the start who is going to get "protected" to preserve their strength to get the best shot at getting gold?
Most countries will have a clear leader yes, especially the big ones with 4/5 riders. Sometimes they hedge their bets by having one guy "free", often in the breakaway. It apparently wasn't so much the case with the Dutch women this year though.
And yet, there are quite a few solo wins. I think somewhere between 10 and 25 percent of races get won solo?
The advantage of the solo strategy is that everyone behind you is trying to put in less effort than the others behind you. So they can get stuck in a game theoretical tragedy of the commons.
Why 5k when it's only a week since Austrian Christoph Strasser set the records for 1000 (one thousand) kilometers, in just under a day (with 2 minutes total for breaks and clothes changes).
Because I ran distances from 5k to marathon (with 10k being my favourite) and so I know from my own experience. I have no knowledge of how you run a 1000k run.
Though I should have noticed, it is not possible to run 1000k in a day. Maybe you could, but you would need to have flat terrain and maybe something like a... bike:)
Not saying she shouldn't had won, but when nobody is pursuing you, it is much easier to win.
She certainly benefited from a mistake by the other competitors, but “much easier” is surely a big exaggeration. You could equally well say it’s much harder to win the race when you’re out by yourself, with nobody to chase, nobody to set the pace, and no pack to draft with.
If she hadn’t cycled the race of her life, she would have been caught.
I don’t think “much easier” is an exaggeration at all. It is hard to win with no help as you say. Which is why there’s a good chance that she would have been caught if the people who did have help knew there was someone they needed to catch.
That being said, good on her for sneaking away getting out in front unnoticed. It’s not always just about pure ability.
Let's just say, and I know this from experience as amateur runner, when you ride an olympic effort you are probably not the best at counting and remembering things.
The road race at the Olympics is somewhat of an outlier in cycling. It uses national teams as opposed to commerical teams, so riders ride with unfamilar teammates, and in this case the biggest favorites were actually teammates. It also bans radios, so there's no direct communication between the coaches and the riders possible.
I didn't see this race yet, and although I enjoy watching it I'm no expert on road cycling. However, ISTR that in every televised race there is a particular motorcycle that stays with the lead rider(s). If a racer thinks she's on the front and doesn't see that motorcycle around somewhere, shouldn't she reconsider her position?
Also the racers who had been on the breakaway and got caught knew she was still up there, but they might not have cared to tell anyone about it.
world/european championship has the same national structure as the olympics, the radios are present in those races, so in that way the olympics is unique.
The big difference between typical pro races and the Olympics is that in the Olympics the riders don’t race with radios, which made this situation possible. In a typical pro race, the team director would be telling his riders there is still someone up the road.
When there is someone ahead, you also get hesitation. No one wants to expend the effort to catch them. Everyone hopes that someone else will put in that effort.
It's a classic game theoretical 'tragedy of the commons'.
The same could have happened here. The dutch riders were all riding for themselves. The other riders would probably have looked to the favorites to close the gap.
Harald Bohr won a silver medal at the 1908 Olympics with the Danish football team. He was also a notable mathematician, an editor for Acta Mathematica and he discovered the fascinating Fastperiodische Funktionen.
Sports and academics were not unusual in his family: his brother Niels (not an Olympian, but a known physicist) had a son Ernest who was an Olympian in 1948 (hockey).
Unlike his father and brother Aage, Ernest did not win a Nobel (he was a lawyer).
Thanks for adding this anecdote. Is it the same mathematician who worked on almost periodic functions ? I have run into those in my line of work. On second thoughts, I guess that's what Fastperiodische Funktionen means.
On a different note this would be the third example where the person concerned is Danish.
The fact that she's a woman doesn't make this interesting. (Woman winning women's cycling wouldn't be much news.) The reason this is interesting is because she's a Mathematician and an amateur.
Any 2 humans who are simultaneously good mathematicians and good athletes have much more in common than most pairs of women or most pairs of men have just because they have the same sex.
No offense intended, it seems my comment has upset you or someone else who has been downvoting unrelated comments.
Turing is a person of interest here, for obvious reasons, so did not think it would be out of place. Gender identity was the last thing on my mind.
There are some similarities, a mathematician, amateur sportsman in an Olympics, don't you think ? Turing's running mates were quite unaware of his technical and academic contributions, partly due to the secrecy of his wartime contributions.
If women athletes with academic accomplishments interest you, you may checkout Corinna Cortes. She is VP at Google Research, known for her foundational work in machine learning, support vector machines in particular. She is Danish, if that matters to you.
Honest question: why would this be interesting in this context?
(Edit: check the follow-up comments to see why I wasn't as surprised as others about Ms. Kiesenhofer being both sportswomen and active academic and therefore did not make the connection with Mr. Turing immediately)
It’s super rare to be intellectually gifted and a world-class athlete. There was an NFL offensive lineman with a published mathematical paper as well, but I didn’t know about Turing’s physical talents until now.
I don’t know of any other instances of brilliant people being paid or awarded medals for their physical abilities, so I personally found it interesting.
I guess the parent comment was for those of us that were intrigued by the intersection of top-tier physical and mental abilities.
It’s also a healthy correction for the nerds-versus-jocks dichotomy which was so common for years. There are a non-trivial number of people who actively questioned someone’s technical competency if they were athletic or assumed that the only way to be a successful academic was to grind everything else out of their life.
My experience is that high-achievers in one area are often high-achievers in other areas as well. For academics as well as athletics, individual ability matters, but the discipline and work-ethic that most high-achievers have translates across fields.
Yes - also simply the circumstances: if you’re in a position to do either well, you probably don’t have serious chronic health problems, family demands, poverty, etc. That doesn’t make it easy but it makes it possible to focus on something more than survival, much as how coming from a financially stable family makes it easier for someone to take a gamble on a startup rather than a safer job at a big company.
Because he's also a Mathematician in the Olympics, similar to (but not as successful) as Mrs. Kiesenhofer.
We like when nerds are not completely 1 dimensional.
Hmm, I've got a friend who won the German championship in their sport (watersport, individual) and went on to get a PhD in math, so maybe that's why the idea of both being a successful sportsman and following an academic career was not exactly foreign to me. Thanks for replying!
I recently started watching road cycling with this years Tour de France and now the Olympics and it's pretty interesting. A lot of tactical depth and it's a perfect WFH background noise- it plays out over hours so you don't have to be watching every minute
Both mens and womens road race in the Olympics were excellent too, a lot of drama and interesting mind games
What an amazing effort from Kiesenhofer. I imagine being alone in the front for that long would be many times more effort than staying in the peloton. Heroic effort.
I am curious how this upset compare with other upsets in previous Olympics? Has there been bigger upsets than this one?
If this were a tennis event, would this be like someone who was ranked top 50 or top 100 in the world beating Novak Djokovic to win gold?
Think of it more like this: "cyclist who is very good at riding all-out on her own has chance to ride all-out on her own; peloton that has potential advantage of strength in numbers doesn't use advantage; to some surprise, lone rider wins."
This doesn't happen in stage races because of radios and professional teamwork, but I'm this race the technology and incentives aligned to open the door for a breakaway win.
The fun part is that the cyclist who won isn't even optimized to compete in the same way as the others. She's literally a time trial specialist who rejected a pro team offer because she didn't want to compete on anything but personal cycling performance, and then she beat those teams.
I'm just about to watch this, very excited to see it play out. I'm listening to the very start of the race right now and it's very funny how things work out:
"[The smartest racer will win, not just the strongest. Well who are we kidding, you need a good bit of luck too.]"
That's certainly true given the sheer luck on display (peloton lost track of breakaway) and how smart Kiesenhofer is. I also think it's interesting how much she dislikes riding in the peloton. She's 10ft off the back in the starting roll-out.
Her victory is well deserved, but from what I can tell in the Olympics isn't it the case that unless they're right in front of you contestants have no way of knowing if they're even winning? This could be a case of #2 and #3 falling from the lead and not even realizing they're #2 and #3, and rather thinking they're #1 and #2. If they knew their true positions it's possible the outcome could've been different.
>if they knew their true positions it's possible the outcome could've been different.
That is part of the sport. riders keep up with time gaps on boards from the motos, they go back to their team car for information (and water), count the riders getting brought back, they talk with their team mates or even other teams about the situation. Radioless races are run differently, but the favourites forgetting the road leader is not common and embarrassing.
There are no radios allowed at the Olympics, like there are at professional races (ie Tour, Vuelta, Giro etc.)
That simple. The last refresh point was ~50kms before the final, if the person there didn't give an info to the riders then they just didn't know how far she was ahead hence the confusion of van Vleuten at the finish
No radios really exposed the poor racecraft of the Dutch riders. Seen some commentators criticising the no radios in OL (and WM) races, but I personally I think it is nice that it emphasize the skill of the rider and minimise the impact of SD's. Riders in the van Vleuten group, such as Uttrup, did know that there was a rider up the road. So it does seem that the mishap is truly on the Ducth riders.
For some reason this story reminded me of the French winning 4x100 freestyle relay in London 2012. They went in as the underdogs but trounced the Americans with Yannick Angel who swam the final leg absolutely trouncing Phelps and co. He was also an athlete who had a hobby of reading and was quiet a good student at that time. There is something mesmerizing about athletes who also embrace intellectually stimulating activities.
Nothing to take away from Anna Kiesenhofer. It is an absolute brilliant win. But an amateur winning a sporting event supposed to be for amateurs has become news. It's sad how much Olympics has lost its original meaning and intent.
<Women>: Does incredible things, that typically men are way better at (math and sports) and: She even does 2 of them, at the same time and to the very best. Incredible. Bravo!
How plausible/believable. And what an adorable women and a role model for other girls. And we need so many more female role models to inspire as many young girls as possible (ideally: All of them).
Having kids and a family (with a man,... a protector?!) is really lame and needs to be avoided. Top notch careers are much more important. I mean: Who doesn't want to be remembered by the random name that was given to you - First name by your parents, last name by people in the middle ages struggling to keep people apart during rapid population growth. I feel very inspired now.
Thank you journalist (w/m/d) for writing this article.
It is clear that men are all grabbing for these enviable positions just for the sake of it (and not as a means for anything else) and we need to get women there, too.
So you have a complicated group dynamic, where the majority of the peloton has no interest in pulling the group to catch the break, since they would just get beat by one or more of the Dutch riders, and the Dutch riders didn't seem to have a clear plan on how to control the race and who would sacrifice their chances and work on the front for the rest of the team.
As others have said, there were no radios allowed for riders in the race, so all information about the breakaway came from the race director's car trailing the peloton. This was a well known fact about the race coming in, and it's the same way that the annual World Championship race is run. It's normal for riders to drop back to the team car to get information about the break, and the lead moto for a group of cyclists will occasionally show time gaps on a whiteboard.
At least one of the Dutch riders claimed to have known about the lone rider off the front [1], but somehow that information didn't make it to the rest of the team. It seems that most of the peloton didn't know (or didn't care) how many riders were up the road, and the Dutch team failed to communicate amongst themselves and establish a plan.
All that leads to Kiesenhofer's solo move working out. All credit to her for an extremely strong ride.
[1]https://netherlandsnewslive.com/miscommunication-and-underes...