Homotopically invisible singular curves

Given a smooth manifold M and a totally nonholonomic distribution \(\Delta \subset TM \) of rank \(d\ge 3\), we study the effect of singular curves on the topology of the space of horizontal paths joining two points on M. Singular curves are critical points of the endpoint map \(F\,{:}\,\gamma \mapsto \gamma (1)\) defined on the space \(\Omega \) of horizontal paths starting at a fixed point x. We consider a sub-Riemannian energy \(J\,{:}\,\Omega (y)\rightarrow \mathbb R\), where \(\Omega (y)=F^{-1}(y)\) is the space of horizontal paths connecting x with y, and study those singular paths that do not influence the homotopy type of the Lebesgue sets \(\{\gamma \in \Omega (y)\,|\,J(\gamma )\le E\}\). We call them homotopically invisible. It turns out that for \(d\ge 3\) generic sub-Riemannian structures in the sense of Chitour et al. (J Differ Geom 73(1):45–73, 2006) have only homotopically invisible singular curves. Our results can be seen as a first step for developing the calculus of variations on the singular space of horizontal curves (in this direction we prove a sub-Riemannian minimax principle and discuss some applications).