For a few years now, Zwift’s race calendar has included some unmaintained or poorly attended events. And while Zwift announced a cleanup effort two years ago, that initiative was later paused… until this week, when Zwift informed race organizers of a calendar “cleanup” currently underway. Let’s look at the details!
It’s About Participation Levels
Zwift’s announcement says, “We are taking action now in order to ensure that all races on the platform have adequate participation and provide a great racing experience for all involved.” In talking to contacts within Zwift, that statement nicely summarizes their reasons for culling some events from the calendar.
Back in 2022, when Zwift first looked at removing races from the calendar, they shared this interesting bit of info which is still true today:
Detailed analysis of all racing events demonstrates a very clear correlation between the number of participants in an event/subgroup and the percentage of starters that go on to complete the race – (finishing %s are one of our clearest measures of race quality) -. This correlation is not surprising – we know that in smaller races and/or subgroups it’s more likely that you’ll end up alone and you’ll be less likely to finish the race. This is also supported by a range of qualitative feedback we receive.
Racers know intuitively that most events need a sort of “critical mass” if the experience is going to be a fun one. How many riders are needed in order to make it fun? Opinion will vary, but I’d say you need at least 10 riders in your category, and even more as the race grows longer or the course more hilly.
Zwift has come up with their own criteria for participation to decide which events are removed from the public calendar. They looked at participation numbers for the month of November 2024 and required events to hit particular targets:
- For most racing events, less than 30 participants on average per week
- For hill climb and time trial events, less than 20 participants on average per week
By the Numbers
Zwift says approximately 240 weekly community race events will be moved to their respective clubs in this cleanup, while all Zwift-owned TT and Hill Climb events will also be removed (approximately 70 per week).
With around 1200 weekly race events scheduled in recent weeks, that means we’ll seeing an overall reduction in race events of approximately 25%.
Public to Private
Events that don’t meet the minimum participation requirements will be moved from the public calendar to the host club’s private calendar, meaning they will still exist and continue repeating each week, but you must be a member of the club to see the event in your Companion app schedule.
If you’re a race organizer who is wondering if this move impacts your events, check your email. Zwift’s James Bailey has contacted any impacted racing organizers directly.
Target Date
Zwift says they are “aiming to complete these changes by 16th December.”
Getting Back On the Calendar
Having your event moved to your club’s private calendar isn’t necessarily the end of the line for your race. The event could return to the public calendar if you’re able to boost participation levels.
Zwift says, “If any of these events subsequently achieve the criteria (for a minimum of three weeks in a row), we will be happy to reinstate the specific event(s) to the public calendar.”
It sounds like Zwift will be more strategic moving forward when it comes to considering new event requests. James Bailey says, “Going forward we will start to manage the public racing calendar much more actively and will carefully consider any new event requests with respect to the current volume of events, activity on the platform and other factors at the relevant time of day. The criteria outlined above will also apply to new events, which will undergo a trial period. Should you wish to create any new events please continue to contact me directly, and we can discuss your request in the context of the above.”
Concluding Thoughts
I, for one, welcome this move from Zwift. I think most racers will, too, because there have been too many poorly maintained and/or poorly attended races on the calendar for far too long.
When you have 10 races scheduled near the top of each hour instead of 3-5, some riders will inevitably sign up for races with poor participation numbers, and the experience for those riders will be degraded. It’s not always easy to figure out which race(s) will be getting large enough fields when you’re browsing events a few hours (or days) out.
Here’s an interesting stat: sources within Zwift tell me that the majority of riders sign up for races within 24 minutes of the event. That means you can’t be sure of how much participation a race will have until the final minutes leading into the event. Therefore, Zwift needs to be even more careful to curate their race calendar so riders know when they sign up for an event, they’ll have a great experience racing against a competitive field.
Questions or Comments?
What do you think of Zwift’s move to clean up the race calendar? Share below!
Great initiative. However, races can also get too big. Racing 400 others is simply chaotic, and the game can’t even display more than 100 riders at a time – it’s impossible to see how many that are behind/in front of you.
They should consider putting a limit to the number of participants in races to (1) spread out participation to more events, and (2) force people to make up their minds before 24 min. before the race starts.
If the worry is that people will just sign up and then be no-shows, they could enforce a sweat drop penalty for quitting races, quarantine for repeated no-showers, and a limitation to how many events you can sign up to at a time.
I don’t disagree that the race experience in a group of hundreds could use improving. BUT… when was the last time you were in a race with a pack larger than 100? It’s quite rare on Zwift in the past couple of years.
Didn’t check the data, but I often see over-booked Zwift-official events in the European evening time-slots. Maybe rides, not races, but rides are also raced …
The popular FRR and Chasing race slots can get there. VirtuSLO endurance has as well if I recall correctly, these all in the last few months. Definitely still happens
That 100-rider limit, I wonder what year that will finally be improved on?
Each week in zRacing over the last month or so I’ve had over 100 in my 180-350 Pen.
The UK/EU early evening time slots do get really busy. Personally I don’t mind having over 100 in a pen, I’ve done zRacing events with well over 200 in my pen previously, I like to draft, lol!
In theory a pen limit could spread riders to other events, and I like the thought of being able to help do that, however in practice with the busier UK/EU time zones it would likely result in some people not being able to join an event any day at all as they’ll all hit 100 and people may not be able to do other earlier/later times.
Lol downvoted for having an opinion! Nice chat fellas.
I agree, smaller races means your actions matter more.
Haha, yeah, keyboard warriors 🙂
Conform or be cast out damn you. No free thinking allow. When in doubt go with the popular kids. 5 feet tall 53kg or less body weight, and still can’t win a sprint you know. Those kids.
I agree, but would like to go even further. This is too little, too late. I take that the numbers, (30 and 20) are for all classes combined. This means we will still see a large number of races with single digit participants per class (which is what counts, after all.)
I have frequently found myself wanting to race only to find more than ten races starting at the same time, none with double digit participants. That’s a hard no for me. If there were three races, each would definitely have significant participation. If, instead, there were eight races, there may still be poor participation.
Cut harder, Zwift!
(If the numbers are per class, not per race: Well done, Zwift! I’m on board!)
It’s possible they will cut more. Zwift basically said in their statement that they’ll be looking at the numbers and if participation requirement need to be adjusted further they’ll do that.
I think they also need to look at “how many” events are being authorised for a specific time of day based on the number of racers overall that are on Zwift at those times as well as that day of the week. We all know certain countries and time zones have more or less riders so to a certain extent those times should have more or less events (as a maximum) at those times to try and give choice without over-diluting all of the events at those times.
Yes. The categories is a better measure than the race.
there aren’t many A graders less B’s and lots of C’s
I hope that not too many TT events are culled, there are already too few of these. I think all TT events should be “E” cat, it makes no sense to separate people when you cant draft. Then you get a more interesting experience, just like in real life, TTs dont have categories.
I’m trying to think who used to run a fun short multi iTT event on Sundays (5 back to back?), anything from 0.5Km to approx 5Km, which at the time alternated between open entry and women only each. SZR?
Would love to see something similar as a public event, covering lots of differing profiles, from pancake flat to mini mountain stages.
Those were run by Team Swedish Zwifters! 😀
Yeah! I was the organizer and it was fun to choose odd lenghts and courses. The shortest was just 200 m. The last Sunday we did 7 races in an hour 🙈
It’s hard to look at the timetable and go “you know what, too many TTs”. Especially as TT results are much easier to conglomerate. It’s nice when there are people in front and behind when I’m TTing, but it’s not a requirement. Having a slot that’s convenient _is_.
There is any ITT series with montlhy general classification by accumulated time?
I think this is the gem of a great idea – if done daily rather than monthly.
Zwift TTs don’t need everyone to compete at the same time, so in theory you could have “daily TT competitions”, done at any time on demand.
It would be a shame if TT events were culled heavily as they are very much a solo effort. As much as I hate them myself i know others like them.
What i’d like to see with TT is having something a bit different Some way to choose a course/route of the week yourself, signup and ride it at any time then have a global/team leaderboard.
This is where zwift is missing out, constrained by zwift events and zp scoring formats.
I love that idea, Gordon.
Are Zwift’s systems currently able to do something like that?
If so, maybe you could chat with Zwift about that for us? It’s a really good idea!!
They could set it as an on-demand workout every week, and call it something like “This week’s iTT challenge’ . Virtupro does it well. They have holograms of riders who’ve done it before, so you know how you’re performing
This has been done in a community format for the last couple of years. It was a series called Shut Up Legs and was great fun. It was a lot of admin work for the organizer…everything was done manually using Strava segments. It’s not running anymore, as it seems the burden of it became too much for the admin. But it was well attended by around 50-100 racers from all categories, and the reviews were fantastic. Gordon is on to something here!
Every zwifter: I think I might do that race five days from now if I have a good week and am feeling good that day.
24 minutes before race: I barely slept last night, did a hard workout yesterday and feel like crap, screw it, I’m doing the race anyway, where are my bibs!?
That took quite a while.
Question, what does that faint gray notation with finish flag in the ZwiftPower results table denote? It doesn’t seem to match the results themselves in either ZwiftPower or Zwift’s Events/View.
Finishers
I’ve never been one to post a comment, but the culling of TT events makes me incredibly sad because there were already too few of them as others have mentioned. I used them when I didn’t want to do a structured threshold workout to get the same or better stimulus in the legs while challenging myself to push to the absolute limit of what I thought was possible. I was about to start doing them again, but I guess I’ll have to look at other options if they do go through with culling those events.
I agree. They already took away the only time during the week that I could participate in the Zwift TT Club races. Being in California, the only remaining time slots not during my work day are at 4:30 am and 11:20 pm. There are plenty of events and races to choose from but I miss doing the TT once a week. (On weekends I do Tiny Races on Saturdays and try to do a longer activity on Sundays if I’m not riding outside.)
Yeah, there seems little good reason to cull TT events, unless there are ones competing at the same time struggling for numbers then maybe get those clubs to rotate times or combine their events etc. It’s particularly silly given that they are by their nature solo-ish events and that Zwift Companion already has separate specific “Filters” so you can set to either see or not see all Time Trial and/or Team Time Trial events in the list, so people not interested in them can hide them all from view.
Agree. The Zwift Hill Climb series is also in this category for me…I used them as alternatives for structured workouts, especially when I needed to spend X time at or above threshold. The elimination of Zwift TT’s and Hill Climb events are another reason why I’ll be rethinking my Zwift subscription…
I don’t see very many long (50k+) races on Zwift. It would be a shame if the culling resulted in even fewer.
+1 on that. Specially on wekeends, Zwift could have more events with a fondo flavour. Not group rides, not fast keep-on-pack-or-go-home races. Hilly and mid mountain routes, almost like a hard endurance ride with competitive friends and the bonus of being in a race.
You appear to be describing the Epic Races that run 5 times a day at the weekend.
Exacly! I’ve never seen anything about Epic Races, it just exists. It feels almost like an underground league
Epic Races are the best races of the week period….
None on Saturdays Ausi time – and only on Sunday and Monday with non-Ausi friendly timeslots. Please show some Ausi/NZ luv in re-jigging schedules, we are so neglected.
I still think there is scope for “longer but not super long” races to be made into a “zRacing Extended” etc. month-long series. I still regularly hear people saying that zRacing is too short, but people do it because it’s on regularly and has good attendance numbers. If those ‘Zwift Epic’ races at 40km-ish were made into a zRacing style series taking over a handful of the standard zRacing time slots each day or every other day for a four or five event series then they could spark a bit of a switch. Weekend numbers are generally lower and those stand alone races (with the potentially discouraging ‘epic’ moniker) may dissuade people and can also end up in direct competition with existing longer events (like Supersonic Sunday, Sufferday, FRR etc.)
That’s why I mostly just race the fondos, TdZ and ToW. Lots of participants, long courses not just 20 minutes and no screwed up racing score. WinWin :O)
I don’t know if this is logistically possible, what if Zwift TT Club was on-demand – but results aggregated in Weekly and monthly standings. I always cared more about that than the individual race (unless there were a few “key” competitors/friends in the same time slot 😉 )
It’s not possible with our current set up.
But we are taking notes from all of your comments!
I take James point and don’t know your backend capabilities/technical debt required to change it. But yes, imagine how popular a Fortnite style on-demand race format would be – join a pen for a specific course and wait for it to fill with 30 riders, then a 3 minute countdown to race. So much more flexible for people in all different time zones. TT would be a great way to test it out!
Agreed, same with the Hill Climb series. I’ve always wanted to dip in as and when I’m ready as a challenge. Sometimes I just get in the pen early and to secure a slot while I’m doing something else.
On demand would be great and keep a record of times in ZC or in the game. Appreciate its not possible in the current setup, but if you could work some magic in future updates 😄
This would be SO awesome. I’ve suggested it in the club a few times over the past year, but understand it would take some technical effort. And there’s a comment above about even adding ‘ghosts’ of other riders so that you don’t feel totally alone. That’s an amazing idea. You could even ride with other people in the current world showing (not like in normal races where you are in a parallel dimension) since TT’s aren’t impacted by drafting!
I would not even mind if most if not all club races would be deleted.
If Zwift would provide with a regular amount of races why need any more ?
If they would make a scratch race, points race, chase race, hill climb, TT say every 30 minutes at .00 and .30 and every two hours a longer race.
And change routes also every 30 minuts it would be more than plenty if they schedule that 24/7.
Clubs can have group rides, but no need for them to organize races. Besides perhaps a few exceptional ones like Tiny or more days events.
And yes, I know this will get lots of downvotes but we dont need 2000 events a month.
Maybe with this clean up, they’ll finally add back the crit city races 🙂
It might have been inflated numbers due to the covid surge, but several years ago those races were very well attended on the weekends and always a very competitive race.
With all these events being pushed to the clubs are there plans now to expand the tools for club organizers creating races? Currently they get set as “group rides”. As a club organizer I would like the ability to do at least the following within my club:
I know that a few of these options can be selected on a unfriendly browser edit of the event but recently none of those edits have actually been enacted in my club events
This is really shortsighted by Zwift in my opinion. One victim of this decision is Zwifts now TT events that won’t continue in the club. There are already precious few TT options and actually a small field in an individual event doesn’t really matter for a TT as it’s you against the clock. I strongly urge Zwift to rethink some of this as it really alienates some of their most diehard supporters like me.
I’m not sure that races that go from public to private will ever be able to get back on the public calendar given their potential reach will decrease 10 fold once their not on zwiftpower anymore.
did I miss the link to the announcement?
I’m not sure if it’s been announced in any public places. I know it was announced on a FB group just for Zwift ride organizers…
Sad to see the Zwift ITT series go. As many say, the number competing in each TT matters less than the overall number competing in the week
It would be good if the non-peak schedule (where participation is already low – looking at you ~1am-7am UTC Mon-Fri timeslot) was adjusted to single pens as well (for Zwift owned events). We already have very low turnouts compared to our euro-based colleagues so throwing us into a single pen would help motivations.
Personally, I was frustrated by the distance that had to be covered after the KOM segment for many Zwift Hill Climb Club events.
I was also frustrated by the length of monthly Zwift TT Club events in the later weeks, I have no interest these days in doing a TT much longer than a rolling terrain 16.1Km.
… Horses for courses.
Is there recent data on race attendance? Maybe number if races increased but anecdotally it feels as if number of racers dropped significantly over the last two years. Joining a race on Thursday night around 8pm CET would have numerous large fields. Remembering being ‘competitive’ being in the third group on the road on Flanders races for instance. Tonight there were just seven finishers across all categories.
I have my own theory on the why (assuming it is true).
Another TT thought (possibly another “challenge” option)…
TT every open badged route in every world (possibly within a year or some other set timeframe?). Total elapsed time = Zwift TT World Score.
“[A]ll Zwift-owned TT and Hill Climb events will also be removed (approximately 70 per week).” But these will continue as club events thought, right? It would be a terrible shame just to lose these!
Really like the cut down on events. Think there is a real negative feedback loop if you can call it like that. When an event doesn’t have a lot of participants, then people don’t sign up for these events which will again attract less people.
Think Tour of Watopia/Zwift or the MAAP series proof exactly that point. More people sign up to these events despite it not even being a race just because there are so many people riding.
I know this is a long shot and when I look into roadmap for the ZRS, I am not confident, that this idea will be even doable. But just imagine thinking little outside of traditional cycling and more in the direction of video gaming. What I would love to see would be a sort of racing queue. You can queue into that race at any point and once a certain amount of racers with a similar ZRS are matched, you get thrown into a Zwift Race. And that supported by a cool looking ladder with different tears and some other carrots, think that could attract a lot of people. But of course this would propably make more cut downs (maybe replacing the zRacing seires?) necessary.
James said in the TT club last night that following feedback the TT’s will continue after all although people need to show up. This is very welcome news indeed, though he was clear the same won’t happen for the hill climb events.
Don’t forget Asia. Thailand. There is a lot less races already. An hour gap no more please. Better all riders go together in one group. Then can be separated at the end by times .
Please change the algorithm as well. The new algorithm puts me in two groups higher than I can compete at and even coming last 4 times my points don’t drop.
Thankyou.
Not sure how it will encourage more people to join events that only appear if they’re a member of the club though.
I’m sad to see the hill climbing races end. I really liked these challenges and will miss them.
Okey.
But if different categories drives some races above the line of not being put back in the club.
Is there some kind of that statistics considered?
And does Zwift encourage the Clubs that have good racing to go public?
This should be extended to all events in my opinion. There are far too many group events that are poorly attended or have no leader.
The calendar is jam packed as it is meaning new events are often refused their preferred time slot as there’s already other events at that time.
New events should be given a trial period where attendance is reviewed after so many weeks. If attendance is notable they can remain, if not they revert to club events.
CRAP !!!!! There goes My getting my Top 10’s, if there are now
going to be only Fields that are going to have more than 10 Racers
in them! 😂😂😢
I hope this doesn’t leave holes in the schedule. Sure, clean up prime time where there are multiple overlapping events. But don’t take the one race out of the off-peak slot that might be the only one that lines up with someone’s schedule.
And consider what happens around daylight saving when people on different sides of the world get 2 hour time swings. An unpopular spot now might be much more popular in 6 months.
Do “club” races still show up in zwiftpower?
No, they’re private and thus not covered by ZP.
The issue I see Stuart is results, Yes I can copy and paste from the Zwift webpage feed but it has limited information, I can’t edit the races eg, promote riders who have just gone over limits, check rider history for weight changes, strange power readings, riders with no HR which I check against history and if the power etc matches I put them back in. I usually spend a couple of hours a week going through race results, with the limited data and having to find every rider in ZP it would be a nightmare. Although I do agree with the idea the cause is purely down to ZHQ for allowing this to happen, we used to have to contact ZHQ and they would look at what we wanted and if the period was too full you didnt get it, someone took their eye off the ball and it became the Wild West, new races appear every week. It did need doing but we need to be able to see results in ZP format with all the relevant data and club races need a race format.
Going to another platform and finding myself racing one or two others and a few bots was not fun or incentivising. A good initiative
I get it and agree with it for races, but culling Zwift TT events? You don’t need big numbers for TTs to have a good race.
Zwift should do away with ALL community organised races and organise a balanced series of races that are the most popular and cater to the masses them selves. These races should ALL be mass start with all categories in the same Pen and starting at the same time.
Zwift has all the data on when people ride and what people like based on participation so they could quite easily schedule the correct collection of races at the the right times.
Allowing people to organise races doesn’t help and this has been demonstrated by the fact ZWift are looking at culling the event
I would be unhappy about the removal of the Zwift tt events. They are an excellent form of training and offer some variety from normal race events. For my first two months on Zwift, this was the only racing I took part in.
In theory it’s a good change to reduce the number of low participation events and allow racers to coalesce around fewer but higher participation events, however:
1) Zwift need to look at their own impact on other events by way of having their zRacing events on every single hour of every day. Certainly having them every other hour, rotating say even/odd hours from one day to the next would provide a little more space in the calendar for other non-Zwift events to flourish
2) Zwift could also look at some of the events that they are potentially culling and consider whether organising that type of event into a potentially more popular Zwift named ‘series’ would work. For instance I often hear from people that zRacing events are too short, but the individual club events are too long or too poorly attended. So a “zRacing Extended” with courses/races that are about 50% longer might be a good option to try out and see whether the combination of a Zwift name attached along with a 1-month ‘series’ format attracts racers to it.
3) Zwift could also look to help Club events with potential participation numbers by popping up at the end of an event with a “Sign Up For Next Week Now?” type of pop-up where finishers can just click Yes/No, chances are a decent number would click Yes and that ‘early sign-up numbers’ situation can lead to a kind of snowball effect where people looking for an event see this one has people already signed up so they choose it, which encourages more people, and so on…
well in theory this is a good idea but the problem will be when TT & hill climbs drop off. Not everyone wants to do zx racing. If you look at the Zwift hill climbs race series they have 3 events between 3-6 am Australia time & then 2 more over the next 8 hours why not space them out over 24 hours. If there is low attendance why not give us the option of riding them anytime. Dropping things off the calendar will not help going forward how do you find events to do. Improve the racing id & category first they have become a bigger joke.
Hooray, Christmas holidays! So much time during the day to race on Zwift!
Wait, what did you say? Nothing longer than an hour, nevermind something with hills from 11am to 5pm? 🙁
No this is actually the biggest BS i have seen. There are no more races available. Very very limited for A and climbing races almost none at all. This was the biggest Crap move in History
Zwift has simply killed racing completely with this nonsense.
This has just eliminated the ITTs. I used to race my favourite TT course which is Bologna. Used to compare my own times to know where I’m at. Now I just can’t find it anymore when I have a time slot for Zwift 😞
I’m disappointed with this move by Zwift
Very disappointed- more races with fewer participants meant higher probability of seeing the podium on occasion. Now not a chance. Where can I find the smaller private races to join?