Zwift Climb Portal Usage Stats

July 4, 2023

LAST UPDATED July 4, 2023

Zwift’s Climb Portal opened at noon PST Friday, June 30th. Once it opened I went to work creating Strava segments for the new climbs and got most of them created within a few hours.

Now, just over three days later, I thought it would be fun to look at the segment stats for Zwift’s Climb Portal…

The Big Numbers

Here are some key summary numbers taken from the 8 France-based climb portal segments as of 1pm Monday, July 3:

Total elevation gain: 7,868,828 meters
Total distance ridden up climbs: 117,084 kilometers
Average incline (elevation gain/total distance): 6.7%
Total climb completions: 22,353

Elevation vs Climb Completions

Does the amount of climbing (elevation) affect how often a climb is done? Perhaps…

Cote de Pike is the expected outlier since it’s been the featured climb since the Portal launched. And the shortest climb in the Portal (Cote de Trebiac) is also quite popular.

But apart from those two climbs, there isn’t a clear trend showing that shorter climbs are more popular. It will be interesting to see how these numbers shake out in the coming months. My guess is that a climb’s popularity will have more to do with how Zwift surfaces it to Zwifters than anything else.

Total Meters, By Climb

Strava shows a total of 7.8 million meters climbed on the France Climb Portal segments so far. But which climbs account for which portions of that total?

Again, not surprising to see Cote de Pike with the largest percentage. Puy de Dome is a bit of a surprise with the second-most meters accumulated. As one of the longer climbs in the Portal, we wouldn’t expect it to be so much more popular than the other climbs. Does anyone have an explanation?

Hill Repeats

Climbers love their hill repeats, and it looks like many riders aren’t satisfied with just a single summit. Which climbs are riders repeating the most?

Col du Platzerwasel is the outlier here. Why so many more repeats than the other climbs? Perhaps one clue is that it has been completed less than any other climb. Our guess is that a handful of Platzerwasel fans (or bots) threw the numbers off a bit, and the numbers will event out more as time goes on.

Data Caveats

It’s important to add a few notes to this data:

This is Strava, not Zwift: these numbers don’t account for all rides on Zwift. They only account for rides Zwifters have uploaded to Strava, and around 70% of Zwifters have their account hooked up to Strava.
Climb completions, not climb attempts. The data in this post does not include activities where riders only climbed partway to the summit.
Missing historic data: a small number of climb completions may not be included in this data, since I wasn’t able to make all 8 Strava segments as soon as the Climb Portal went live. Strava is a bit weird about reading in past attempts for newly-created virtual segments, so I can’t promise summits uploaded before the segment was created are included in my data.
Only France: because Zwift maps your portal climbing to whatever world you start in (France or Watopia), we have to create two segments for each climb: one starting in Watopia, and one starting in France. The data in this post is only for the France segments, since we haven’t been able to create segments for all climbs in Watopia. (That said, Cote de Pike is the only climb that has been open in Watopia, and it has 6,696 attempts by 2,379 people as of the writing of this post!)