It was Sunday morning, and I had a hankering for a hard Zwift race after being forced to skip my typical long Saturday session. The Companion app showed a list of the usual Sunday morning races:
- KISS 100, which I desperately want to attempt but runs too late for my Sunday church schedule
- Restart Racing Sunday Classic: a possibility, but there weren’t many signed up
- Crit City Race: the old standby
- Herd Winter Race Series: scheduled a bit late for my taste
Crit City it was, then. Eight laps of The Bell Lap route. Let’s do this!
The Warmup – Is My Heart Broken?
While warming up I noticed my Wahoo TICKR wasn’t showing any HR in Zwift. I figured it would work itself out eventually as I started to sweat, so I continued my warmup. But as I clicked to enter the start pens, I realized my HR was still not working.
Wondering if this mattered or not, I checked the event description on ZwiftPower. No mention of HR requirements. If this was ZRL I would have figured out a solution! But this was just a quick Crit City race, and it looked like HR wasn’t even a factor. All good to race.
Racing with the Big Boys
While I was in ZwiftPower I checked the rankings of signed-up riders. We had some real hitters signed up, including Robin Andersson (SZ), the 7th-ranked B in the world. He had two SZ teammates in the race, both super strong guys ranked in the 130s, plus we had Christophe De Grom (BZR) on the list. All riders ranked better than me, so I knew this wouldn’t be an easy podium. But there were ranking points to be had!
The Start + Middle
Most of the race wasn’t remarkable. Just a few highlights to call out:
- I saw several cones of shame – the green cones handed to riders who are performing outside of the 1 or 5-minute power windows designated for each category. It’s been a while since I’ve seen any cones in a B race.
- I tried one small attack a little over halfway through, messaging the group “Attack with me?” beforehand. It worked, shedding a few riders, but my legs weren’t feeling great so I eased up after a minute.
- With two laps to go, we still had a front pack of ~30 after starting with 72.
- Team SZ had four strong riders in the race, so I kept watching for a team attack, especially as we got into the final laps. But they just sat in, biding their time.
The Finish
The Zwift gods had granted me an aero powerup halfway through the race. I’d held onto it for the finish, knowing I’d need all the help I could get against the strong riders in this field.
Last lap. Nobody went early on the twisty climb or the brick descent. I kept my eyes glued to the screen, planning to jump on the wheel of any rider who went early – especially if they were from team SZ!
Soon enough, an SZ rider went orange and sprinted off the front. Hard. I was too slow to catch their wheel, but I hammered anyway, hoping I could make the catch. Then as we neared the hard left turn I activated my aero powerup and went all-in.
As we neared the finish, a green cone popped up next to Andersson’s name. He crossed the line in first. I crossed third.
See activity on Strava >
See ride on Zwift.com >
See results on ZwiftPower >
Disqualified: with Questions
Stoked with a podium against such strong riders, I popped over to ZwiftPower to look at the race results. How many points had I earned?
And that’s when I saw it. Or, more accurately, didn’t see it. Where was my name?
I had to click “Unfiltered” to see it, with a big “HR” next to it. I’d been disqualified for not having a heart rate monitor connected. Adding insult to injury, once the points were calculated I saw I would have earned a result of 149.79 – the best I’ve had in the past 90 days!
And this is where some questions need to be asked. Two, specifically:
- Why was I disqualified for no HR, when nothing in the event said HR was required?
- Why did the first place rider get coned, but get to keep the win?
To be clear: the points result or podium position aren’t a big deal to me. This really isn’t about this one particular race at all. But what this race did was surface two issues I believe Zwift needs to fix.
First: if HR is required, that needs to be stated in the event description and on ZwiftPower. ZwiftPower has several options that event owners can set when it comes to requiring HR:
Apparently only the first two settings (those in green) show up on the event detail page, while the rest do not. This Crit City race is managed by ZwiftHQ, and event organizers tell me ZwiftHQ doesn’t manage the ZwiftPower settings for most of their events. So these Crit City races are just set to some default HR requirement option which isn’t visible in ZwiftPower’s event summary.
Second, if a rider gets coned, they shouldn’t show up in the race results in Zwift or ZwiftPower. (Now, we can debate whether the coning itself is accurate. It’s been in use for almost 2 years now, which means Zwift should have the data to show whether it is or isn’t. If it isn’t, it shouldn’t be used at all. But if it is, then it needs to have an effect on the results sheet.)
I want to reinforce that I’m certainly not questioning whether Andersson deserved the win. He’s a strong B with killer 1-minute power, and a legit B rider according to ZwiftPower’s parameters. He won the race fair and square, following all the stated rules.
Again, it’s not about this race. But I think it’s worth pointing out the weirdness of being disqualified by an unstated rule, while another rider can trip an anti-sandbagging control in the game and win the race with a cone over their head. Zwift can do better.
Asking Zwift
I’ve got a great relationship with the folks at ZwiftHQ, so I reached out to them about this race and the issues I’ve outlined above.
And as I was composing my email to them, I realized it’s quite possible ZwiftHQ has decided, for these small weekly races, the in-game results are the “final” results, and ZwiftHQ doesn’t manage ZwiftPower settings at all. After all, the event description does say, “Results are shown as you cross the finish line.”
The more I’ve thought about it, the more I think this is the case.
But this hasn’t been confirmed by ZwiftHQ. While they acknowledged receipt of my email, I haven’t heard back from them yet with an answer to my questions.
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