Toolbox: A breakaway in a cycling race is a hotbed of intrigue, with friends working together for the common good while also plotting their betrayal of the group as a whole. What are the factors that actually enhance the odds that the early breakaway takes it all the way to the line?Van Vleuten tore up not just the Worlds, but also all economic models.Efforts like Annemiek van Vleuten at Yorkshire Worlds is an extreme outlier, with a solo long-range breakaway from 105km out succeeding. Outside of that, most professional mens WorldTour racing follows a relatively predictable pattern, with an early breakaway establishing itself. There then follows a prolonged period leading up to the finish, where the break may or may not become caught.Sport is often said to be a reflection of society, and parents often say sports teaches kids valuable life skills like cooperation, perseverance, etc. But for economists, sport is also a valuable model for social dilemmas and real-life questions like cooperation, because it offers a fairly self-contained and transparent situation. To that end, a paper in the Journal of Economic Psychology modelled the economic strategies buried within the cycling break away to help answer larger questions about private versus public good and cooperation (Brouwer and Potters 2018).The ‘Break of the Day’Within the break, there are private incentives at play versus the common good. Riders need each other’s strength in order to keep the peloton at bay. Thus they are friends for a while. However, even during this period…
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