Have you ever wanted to see how long you can hang on with the pros?
Starting on 17th February, Zwift is hosting a monthly race called the ELITE Pro Series. What makes this series special is ELITE inviting professional cyclists to line up and race shoulder to shoulder with fellow Zwifters, giving riders the special chance to measure their ability against the best.
While the events feature standard categories (A/B/C/D and women-only E), all categories will start together, allowing even lower-category riders to ride with pros… at least for a bit!
For the professional riders and their teams, this is a chance to connect with their fanbase and race not only the global community, but fellow pros. The competition will be intense and fun and even though I don’t expect to be anywhere near the front, just being in a race with a host of pros is exciting enough.
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Courses and Schedule
Courses will vary from month to month, ensuring that everyone will be able to race on a route best suited to their strengths. This includes having to race up a big mountain climb!
The first event kicks off on 17th February at 6:30pm GMT/1:30pm EST/10:30am PST and will be hosted on Watopia’s “The Magnificent 8” course (28.6km, 131m elevation). Subsequent months’ events will also be on Thursdays at the same time. Here is the complete list of series events (click to sign up):
The list of confirmed teams and pros for the first event are:
Matteo Jorgenson
Movistar Team
Alicia González
Movistar Team
Tobias Ludvigsson
Groupama-FDJ
Lewis Askey
Groupama-FDJ
Vidar Mehl
Movistar eTeam
Steph Clutterbuck
Movistar eTeam
Sign up at zwift.com/events/view/2615501
A livestream would be nice for such rides with a Pro. A Pro talking to us before during warmup, we can see him/her during ride for motivation … So many ideas. Zwift could be so much more out of the plattform.
Great idea! But unless you work from home or are retired, the times are terrible. 1:30 in the afternoon. Really.
With an Italian company and riders from French & Spanish teams I think this is very much aimed at the European market. Arguably you could put on 2 or 3 events each day, but I would imagine it would be difficult to get enough pro riders to take part.
It’s very difficult to get commitment from the riders, and has to go through their Team Management. It’s actually a very difficult event to organise, which is why this has never been done before and why we can only do 1 timeslot. Furthermore, you can’t host it on the Weekend due to rider’s schedule or rest days, so this is the best we could do. You can’t also host it late at night European time, for that we would need to link up with US based teams and to my knowledge, Elite don’t have any they sponsor.