The peloton
The workings of a simple group of cyclists confound the greatest minds and supercomputers
Ride in a bunch and you go faster. Everyone knows that. Those at the front and outside (racing’s hard-working ‘domestiques’) take most of the wind resistance, with those furthest-in reaping most benefit.
The consequent tactical complexities are what makes a race a race, and not a time trial. Break away too soon without enough support and you’ll exhaust yourselves. The peloton will reel you back in. But save energy too much, freewheeling inside the cluster, and you may not get out in time to join a wellcalculated sortie.
To some drivers, the peloton – the word comes from the French for ‘little ball’ and is related to ‘platoon’ – is an infuriating symbol of cyclists-as-problem: wide as a car but slower and hard to overtake. (Of course, the same number of riders in single file would be (a) slower and (b) too long to overtake.)
The nuances of peloton behaviour also intrigue scientists. Dozens of formulaedense papers examine everything from instinctive group co-operation (shedding light on animal behaviour and evolution) to mathematical fluid-flow modelling (which suggests there can be 95% less air resistance at the heart of the peloton).
Science almost rules. Racers are notorious among marginal-gains boffins for their preoccupation with power production rather than minimising air-shadow, which has more effect on raising speed.
But tech sceptics who rely on lived experience, intuition and spontaneity, rather than formulae, have a point. In an ideal world, cyclists would be fishshaped. It is not an ideal world, as anyone following a Sustrans route knows. There are huge gaps in the theory of airflow, even with dummy cyclists in a wind tunnel, even with supercomputers. (If you can solve the currently unsolvable NavierStokes equations, for instance, the Clay Institute’s $1m prize awaits.)
And even if things work fine on paper, we don’t cycle on paper. Add in crosswinds, the messy shape of bodies, the unpredictability of human nature, the ‘echelon’ (the linear variant of the peloton for side-winds), punctures, and the spectator who steps out for a selfie in front of the pack, and science will only ever partly determine the outcome.
The peloton, it turns out, is a richer and more complex beast than most of us realise. It transcends science. Ultimately it’s not about fluid-flow maths; it’s about humans.