What can economics, and game theory in particular, tell us about the decisions that give rise to these strange outcomes? Broken records Why do they do it? If the breakaway rarely yields a winner, why don’t they just bide their time in the peloton instead of wasting energy riding faster in the irrelevant early hours of the stage?.How do they get so far in front, only to be reeled in so predictably? Are they really the fastest cyclists in the pack, or just the most unfailingly over-optimistic in the early parts of stages?.To the uninitiated (and often the initiated) eye, this type of behaviour looks illogical.
More often than not, this small group will be caught by the rest of the 200 cyclists (the “peloton”) with less than 20km remaining to the finish, after as much as 200km of fruitless hard labour. Tune into the early stages of the Tour de France, and you’ll likely see a small group of cyclists (aka a “breakaway”) valiantly ploughing a lone furrow through the French countryside for hours on end.
Did this form part of the decision to begin the Tour in Brussels, ending as it does, rather fittingly, in Paris – another Frontier home city? To mark this serendipitous coincidence, some of Frontier’s domestiques have turned their minds to the sport sometimes described as “chess on wheels”. The Belgian capital, of course, has another reason to celebrate this year: 2019 is the 20th anniversary of Frontier’s founding. This summer the world’s most famous cycle race, the Tour de France, takes to the road in one of Frontier’s home cities – Brussels – in recognition of the 50th anniversary of five-time winner Eddy Merckx’s first Tour victory.
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