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
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...