Last week, Zwift sent the following email to elite racers:
Dear Elite Racers and teams,
We know you will be starting to make plans for your next indoor season and therefore we must inform you that Zwift will not be hosting an Elite Zwift World Series this fall.
We understand many of you will be disappointed to receive this news about the series, so please know that this was a hard, but necessary decision for us to make.
For many years Zwift has invested substantially in broadcast production, broadcast distribution partnerships (e.g. GCN), prize money, performance verification and independent governance for elite level regular season racing events like Zwift World Series. Regrettably, the current level of audience interest and viewership for these events makes continuing to support this investment unsustainable.
At this time, the Zwift World Series is the only impacted series but we are considering multiple options for elite racing on Zwift going forward, including partnership.
Regardless, there’s a lot to be excited about this season – with a thriving racing scene, 2025/6 promises to be our biggest community racing season on Zwift yet. You’ll be able to take part in a whole host of new community racing events, each with top racing score categories and there are a number of exciting product developments in the pipeline that will take your racing experience to the next level – stay tuned for further details.
We look forward to seeing you all there.
Best Wishes,
Sean Parry,
Zwift Director of Racing
A Brief History of Elite Racing on Zwift
Elite racing has been happening on Zwift since the early days, but the early efforts were all community-organized. First there were the Zwift Worlds events organized by Tam Burns and Team ODZ in 2015, 2016, and 2017. There was also the CVR World Cup, a massive undertaking by Frank Garcia that included cash prizes and IRL finals.
It wasn’t until KISS Super League in January 2019 that the platform hosted a dedicated competition sponsored by Zwift featuring pro-level esports riders. A year later, Zwift would host the Virtual Tour de France thanks to Covid. And as the crush of new indoor riders heard the news of the brand-new Zwift Racing League (ZRL) launching for the 2020/21 season, the ZRL Premier League was also announced for elite racers.
This ZRL Premier League provided the most structured and long-running elite racing calendar Zwift had ever hosted, and it ran again for the 2021/22 season before elite racing was separated from ZRL, replaced by the Zwift Grand Prix for the 2022/23 and 2023/24 seasons.
The 2024/25 season saw yet another shift, with the Zwift Grand Prix being replaced by the Zwift World Series.
Zwift hosted other elite races along the way, of course, including the first-ever UCI Esports Worlds races (2021, 2022, and 2023). But I did say this was a “brief” history, so we’ll leave it there.
ESports ROI
Zwift has poured more investment than anyone else into the broadcast/marketing side of cycling esports, but as the email clearly states, it’s this need for ongoing investment in “broadcast production, broadcast distribution partnerships (e.g. GCN), prize money, performance verification and independent governance for elite level regular season racing events” that has caused Zwift to drop the World Series for the upcoming season.
Showing a positive return on investment for elite-level cycling esports sponsorship has always been a challenge, in some of the same ways it proves challenging in outdoor cycling. Sponsorships of these sorts of events are often justified as a sort of “loss leader,” as the event loses money but brings exposure to the sport and (hopefully) new customers down the road.
But these sorts of investments play out over years, not days. And even if the ROI is positive (and that’s a big if), measuring it precisely is difficult if not impossible. The result? Top-tier bike teams and major races may struggle to line up reliable sponsorship, and even Zwift may question ongoing investment in elite-level racing on their platform.
[adinserter block=”1″]
What’s Next?
A year ago at this time, Zwift was announcing the Elite Community Racing Calendar for the 2024-25 season. Zwift’s elite racing plans are much fuzzier today, as Zwift’s email above states, “We are considering multiple options for elite racing on Zwift going forward, including partnership.”
On the plus side, it sounds like new Zwift race features are coming, as Zwift states, “… there are a number of exciting product developments in the pipeline that will take your racing experience to the next level – stay tuned for further details.” Is this referring to in-game points or elimination racing? Automatic performance verification? The mythical velodrome? Your guess is as good as mine.
In the email, Zwift encourages elite racers to participate in community-level racing. Will Zwift’s features and robust community racing scene be enough to keep elite racers on the platform? Or will they move to alternatives that offer stronger performance verification (TrainingPeaks Virtual), big prize money (MyWhoosh), real-world race courses (Rouvy), or other benefits?
We will have to wait and see, but one thing is certain: in this next indoor season, more elite racers than ever will be taking a hard look at Zwift, TrainingPeaks Virtual, MyWhoosh, and Rouvy to decide where to best invest their time, money, and racing effort.
Your Thoughts
I’m keen to hear what the Zwift community thinks about all this, so please chime in with your thoughts below.
Time for FRR, SISU, CT/ecro take over the stage races fully as their doing now and zwift backs them up. WTRL with ZRL and TTT. The some smaller one day races. Zwift was needed to do this work early on to get racing going and now can sit back supporting the race organizers and maybe chip in some prizes. While making a calendar of events of top level events with organizers so little to no overlap for good racing.
That would be great, however, Zwift as a platform is not ready for that. They should have invested in more options for community races (as that’s what FRR, SISU, ECRO etc. are) but instead they have let racing go and only implemented the minimal or worse:
What they could/should have done:
In-game support for points races would be fantastic. The other thing that would help a lot is improvements designed to support anyone who wants to broadcast events, like fixing the drone camera controls, making fan view work properly at the start of events, properly showing finish lines in fan view mode. Just basic infrastructure for broadcasting or streaming any race in any world and being able to put on a good show from start to finish. I’ve never found the elite racing broadcasts to be that interesting, which I guess is what they found out as well. But I do watch a lot of streamed races and would be interested in those improvements. I’m more likely to watch races that include people like me, or people in my team, not the elites.
Nathan and Dave were good, knew who was racing, and got excited, especially Nathan.
If it’s a money issue, then Whoosh is always a step ahead it seems. Zwift Games was great, but I know some at Zwift couldn’t get the pros to join in. Personally, I feel the top pros should be in a separate edition.
Virtual Esport Cycling is in winter time…
This might blow your mind, but wintertime is not at the same time everywhere in the world.
Mywoosh will make a clean up now on the racing scene with their prizes etc. Its a shame though its seems zwift shifting more to the groups and leisure side which is also a very good long term plan.
Zwift is at risk of losing up to 20% of its user base—those who primarily use the platform for racing—and it seems they’re starting to realize the threat. Meanwhile, MyWhoosh is pouring resources into its racing ecosystem, making it increasingly difficult for Zwift to keep up.
Zwift is currently facing a significant challenge with the shift in sentiment of its user base. Historically, user comments and community feedback were relatively forgiving—even when issues arose, users tended to be patient and optimistic about future improvements. Not anymore. Since the recent subscription price hike, criticism has surged. Now, people are quick to call out Zwift on almost every aspect, and the goodwill they once enjoyed is rapidly fading.
Your second paragraph is certainly true. Zwift lost a huge amount of goodwill they managed to build up over the years. That’s 100% on them.
Regarding the first paragraph, I’m pretty sure the number of people who are on the platform because of elite racing is minimal. Unfortunately barely anyone outside of the people competing cares about elite races. Maybe they are at risk of losing 2% of their user base but that should be easily compensated by using all the money/resources on the recreational cyclist product and marketing to get more people on the platform.
I think another part of the Elite racing issue is the organizer’s inability to police trainer accuracy. IIRC, the races got cancelled last year when Wahoo couldn’t assure Zwift would get a level playing field from one trainer to another. This is an issue that comes up on the forum consistently. For most of the community races it doesn’t really matter because we’re really just racing avatars and there’s not much on the line. Once you start including prizes and stuff, all bets are off. This certainly streamlines Zwift’s involvement in eRacing.
“there are a number of exciting product developments in the pipeline that will take your racing experience to the next level”
Let’s not kid ourselves about Zwift. It’s the same damn story every time—just a pile of empty promises and, in the end, they churn out some half-assed crap. Don’t bother getting your hopes up, because it’s not happening. The top-tier racers bailed on Zwift long time ago, and why? Because the hardware-addicts running it were too busy snoozing and couldn’t be bothered to throw a single cent into making racing actually decent. Nothing’s going to change anytime soon, trust me.
Amen, and any zwift hardware is junk. The silly virtual cog and the zpod for running (great if you want to manipulate it to run at 30 km/h in game)
The zwift cog and zwift ride was a desperate attempt to tie people into their platform when they saw competition heating up. A reactionary product and too late.
While I am sure the top elite racers on zwift will be disappointed in the news, I feel this is a move in the right direction for zwift. This means more time, money and resources can be refocused back into enhancing the core experience instead of focusing on something that only an extremely small percentage of people will actually participate in.
Basically zwift is allowing the silly wannabe cyclist adults to blow up stats without any regulations.
While I have no way to prove this I feel the group rides and group workouts along with pacer bots likely have a much higher rate of participation amongst the community versus the amount of people in the elite racing category.
Racing on Zwift started as a massive community effort and this gives the reigns back to the community to do what they do best. This is also only a change at the highest level of Zwift racing, a category in which very few members of the community are physically capable of competing in. This is still absolutely an impact for those elite racers and I do not want to understate this but how many zwifters are elite Zwift racers compared to those just needing an hour ride in a rainy day?
At the same time zwift can put those resources into new roads, new features to enhance the core product. One of the biggest complaints about Zwift is they are slow to make changes. This can improve that since the focus is being redirected:)
BS. Have fun riding around with 50 year old+ men doing 5-6 w/kg in zone 2 heart rate LOL fools
You have fun as well:). Stay safe on the road!
By the time you get to be 50 and you’re actually elite doing 5wkg, your HR just looks like z2 (150ish) to young folks who don’t know better (yet). But the 5wkg 50yos are out there. 6…that’s a rarer beast. Of course there’s the zPower types but 5-6wkg isn’t outrageous, and 220-age is strangely fitting for most
“even Zwift may question ongoing investment in elite-level racing on their platform.“
i think we’re past that. Looking forward to the supposed new features are though, lots of medium-hanging fruit out there.
Okay Okay We get it. You’re a very long way off being an Elite Cyclist. All good bro 😀
This may be hard for you to comprehend but things that are necessary for elite racing, performance verification being paramount, are hugely beneficial to us mere mortals. I don’t even bother with ZHQ races because it’s almost guaranteed that some cheater is going to blow it up.
“Is this referring to in-game points or elimination racing? Automatic performance verification? The mythical velodrome? Your guess is as good as mine.”
🤣 as if zwift would ever add Performance verification, they would lose half of the racing community.
Preach brother, if they had to verify they would lose all the “racers” currently because they all BS.
A lot of the comments here are missing the point. This affects elite level racing which nobody is watching so they have decided it’s not worth funding. Not community racing.
This surely is a sensible decision to cut their losses. Watching Zwift racing is boring and nothing will ever change this and Zwift finally realised this.
Earlier this year Zwift released their participation numbers and racing was behind the other activities (group rides, workouts and pace partners) so it makes more sense to divert funds to these to keep the vast majority of their user base happy.
Great, personally as an overweight out of prime man I love the community races. I can taunt all of the real athletes as I am a lazy gamer. Its fun getting back at athletes now with this game, after they beat me IRL horribly. I never update my weight, I actually adjust it so its 20 kg lighter than true so I get a real BOOST. Also, I have a highly inaccurate trainer, which ZWIFT lets me use in the RACES so I can WIN. Please everyone do the same as me, DO NOT BUY ACCURATE TRAINERS, get the ones you can manipulate like kickr snap and spin bikes.
I’m not sure the point you’re trying to make. Zwift aren’t reducing their funding for community racing they are scaling back the elite level racing. They aren’t doing this because some people who cheat are performing better than they should.
Now they need to stop sponsoring athletes and in real life races as again I’m sure these don’t result in more people joining Zwift and just cost them money.
I can see why Zwift would scale back the Elite stuff, they are a business after all and need to make a return. With some of the saving it would be good if Zwift employed one or two full time guys who’s sole responsibility is to focus on community race events and getting shot of the less honest racers quickly and effectively.
It seems to me to be as simple as the viewer numbers weren’t there.
Back during early COVID era I remember thinking that virtual cycling would get a dedicated fan base. That never happened: it quickly saturated.