Anna Kiesenhofer: Mathematician, amateur cyclist, Olympic champion
cyclingnews.com
cyclingnews.com
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...
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
And a better strategy, which is a major part of competition. People commenting on her being lucky. She had a better strategy.
But when they are it's amazing to watch. Completely different circumstances though.
As you said, she’s a mathematician - she knew exactly what she was doing.
But that has nothing to do with having a better strategy.
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.
Observing the environment around you should be obvious?! It is not like Anna Kiesenhofer had the one ring on her finger and was invisible...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_Games#Amateurism_and_p...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Another outcome could be that we would not see the same rider winning multiple years, simply due to missing radios.
All in all seems like a win for viewers.
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.
It’d be boring real quick if they’d make it 21 time trials…
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!
The silver medal winner thought she had won the race.
They need a kick for not communicating amongst themselves.
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!).
40KM without the help of a peloton. Incredible.
FYI, the pros got caught out here a bit. The Olympic road race is probably the last one running that doesn't allow radios.
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].
[1] https://cyclingtips.com/2021/05/gallery-amazing-images-from-...
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://crankpunk.com/2012/11/09/robert-millar-the-case-of-t...
Perhaps a radio channel that just tells riders the state of play without input from the teams themselves.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
The point being: Kiesenhofer won, no matter what.
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.
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.
https://actu.epfl.ch/news/epfl-scientist-wins-cycling-gold-m...
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.
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
Congrats on her win!
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.
[1] Source: https://nos.nl/tokyo2020/artikel/2390838-38-jaar-en-ze-had-m...
Video is country restricted for some stupid reason as it is a interview ... stop whining about rights ...
https://twitter.com/AnnaKiesenhofer/status/14113592085247262...
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.
For ex: an 18yr old Tunisian was a big upset for gold at 400m swimming.
https://ftw.usatoday.com/lists/olympics-swimming-ahmed-hafna...
Not to downplay any of their abilities or achievements.
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.
With more than a minute difference to the rest? She wasn't even in the pack, incredible victory.
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)
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.
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.
That being said, good on her for sneaking away getting out in front unnoticed. It’s not always just about pure ability.
They knew she was in the early breakaway, they just assumed she had been caught.
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.
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.
Delgado had Miguel Induráin [1] working for him, hardly an unknown rider.
Who was Indurain's right hand?
His brother ? I think that Jean-François Bernard did that role at the end of Indurain's career.
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?
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:)
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.
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.
(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)
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.
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).
On a different note this would be the third example where the person concerned is Danish.
Was entertained by how you wrote about all those relations and associations it felt like those logic puzzles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebra_Puzzle
Both mens and womens road race in the Olympics were excellent too, a lot of drama and interesting mind games
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?
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.
Reminds me of an old "Nerds vs. Jocks" joke, from the last century: http://www.spiegl.org/humor/jordan_gates.html
"[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.
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.
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
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.