When Kristen Faulkner made her move to start to get ahead of a four-women group of cyclists, the remaining three had an interesting strategic dilemma. The outcome of the dilemma was that they let Kristen Faulkner go without trying to catch up with her. Kristen Faulkner won Gold, and two of the remaining three won silver and bronze. If the remaining three had collectively decided to push to follow Kristen Faulkner, I believe one of them would have won Gold instead. So why didn’t they?

Lotte Kopecky, the eventual bronze medalist, when asked what happened after Faulkner’s move, said: “It’s a move you can expect. You know she’s going to do it. Then the three of us look at each other, so we are just stupid.” And Faulkner after being asked about it said: “I don’t know – you tell me what happened.” Both of these according to NBC.

I think the outcome of this situation would have been different if there had only been three in the leading group, and therefore only two cyclists to chase Faulkner. The fear of losing out on a medal may have been important in this strategic problem. I don’t know a whole lot about cycling, but I am aware of the slipstream effect. I believe the problem that the three chasers had was this. They all knew that they should now chase Faulkner, but none of them wanted to be the front chaser. Because the front cyclist has to work much harder than the cyclists behind her, due to the slipstream effect, and would most probably have eventually been overtaken and would, thus, most likely have lost out on a medal. If, on the other hand, the three don’t chase, then everyone has a decent chance of winning one of the two remaining medals.

One of my aims with my blog posts is to demonstrate that game theory is much more than the prisoners’ dilemma – many interesting strategic situations cannot be reduced to the prisoners’ dilemma and require some other approach taken from the incredibly versatile toolkit of game theory. But, the problem that the three remaining cyclists had that Faulkner left behind in her race to the gold medal, is very close to the prisoners’ dilemma. The three cyclists had the choice to race off to follow Faulkner. If any of them had chosen to race off to follow Faulkner, the other two would have had a good chance to win the gold medal. But crucially, the one that races off first, probably does not have a good chance to win gold, in fact she might have a good chance to come fourth. Because of this, none of them followed Faulkner.

Could they have done better? Yes, possibly. They could have come to an agreement that they alternate the leading position in the chasing group at reasonable intervals. I guess, this is what they were trying to do when they were looking at (and talking to?) each other just after Faulkner raced off. But it is not easy to come up with such an agreement on the spot and in a short amount of time. And it doesn’t look like they managed to do so.