When watching bike racing on television, getting dropped looks so straightforward. That moment when a rider loses contact with the back wheel in front of them, and a gap starts to open, then grows, then finally becomes an irretrievable gulf. Depending on who it happens to, either they vanish and are never seen again, or the coverage will linger on them cruelly. Whichever, the moment of fracture is clearly visible. The crisis in the mind of the rider, however, is not.
I’ve been dropped many times on several continents. It’s never simple. When a gap opens, you know you need to close it immediately because every metre it grows means an exponential increase in the effort needed to close it.
