Why chasing groups always blink

Cor Vos

Four riders had Mathieu van der Poel on the ropes. All they needed was one more pull, yet nobody pulled. There's a name for what happened next. In cycling, we call it Group 2 Syndrome. In game theory, it's called the prisoner's dilemma.

On the roads outside Harelbeke last Friday, Per Strand Hagenes, Florian Vermeersch, Stan Dewulf, and Jonas Abrahamsen faced a problem. They were four chasers behind one man up the road. The catch was right there, but only if someone spent a few of their remaining matches to make it happen. And whoever does almost certainly loses the sprint. So who goes?

The four never caught him, though at one point they could have thrown a ball at his back. It was one of the more crystalline and exasperating examples of Group 2 Syndrome. But why does it happen? Aaargh! Why doesn’t somebody just … go?

How it came to this

Van der Poel had been alone since the Paterberg, 43 kilometers from the finish. He'd followed a Red Bull acceleration on the Taaienberg, in a lovely nod to the specific way Tom Boonen used to race E3, and in doing so shed most of the peloton's major names.

Van der Poel kept going, bridging to the remaining break – including Dewulf – reassessing for a moment, and attacking again. Dewulf tried to follow on the Paterberg, but that was never going to happen. Van der Poel was solo. By the time his four eventual pursuers had organized themselves into a working group, he had nearly a minute on them.

The group was strong. Vermeersch, in particular, had already ridden through much of the field after a mechanical before the Taaienberg. And he's staring down the barrel at domestique duties for Tadej Pogačar for the next few weeks. They had reason to ride, reason to chase and reason to work together. For now, anyway.

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What a chase is supposed to look like.

Still, it looked, as it has looked at E3 for the past two years, like a formality. Van der Poel would win E3, by a lot.

But the wind was brutal. "It was one of my best efforts, actually," Van der Poel said afterward, "because the wind made it really hard when I went alone." Thirty of those 43 kilometers were straight into a headwind. His shoulders began to rock. The big gear turned with visible effort rather than fluency. The gap that had sat comfortably around a minute began to dissolve. With 10 kilometers to go it was under 30 seconds. With two to go, under ten.

They had him. Had him! He was right there. Then they stopped.

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Guys we're so close

The math of self-interest

Ah, game theory. Leave it to academics to spend fifty years developing a branch of mathematics that perfectly describes three bike racers refusing to pull through.

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