It’s been a busy week in the world of cycling esports, so here’s a quick post to catch you up on anything you may have missed.
Let’s discuss four pieces of recent noteworthy news for Zwift racers, in chronological order:
- Zwift Grand Prix
- Zwift partnering with IndieVelo founders for rider verification
- UCI and MyWhoosh sign three-year Esports Worlds agreement
- Zwift Championships
Zwift Grand Prix
Zwift retooled its elite racing series in 2022, rolling out the “Grand Prix” series and its suite of unique race formats. On July 31 Zwift’s competition team notified top teams’ managers that the next Grand Prix series is happening, and Zwift is now accepting applications for teams.
The Grand Prix will comprise 7 rounds, starting October 19 and ending mid-January 2024. Selected teams will be announced on or around September 8.
What’s different for the Grand Prix this year?
- Grand Prix riders will be racing the ZRL course the Thursday/Friday before racers take it on, for rounds 2 and 3.
- Some or all of the Grand Prix event formats will match ZRL’s, including the new scratch race format, TTT, and points races.
- Teams will be required to have both a men’s and women’s team, which explains why we’ve seen some high-level men’s teams rolling out a women’s team in recent months (NeXT, BL13). Teams are allowed to partner with existing women’s teams in order to make this happen, which is a good move given the number of established women’s only teams on Zwift.
I’m happy to see the Grand Prix being linked into ZRL a bit more, like Zwift’s Premier League (predecessor to the Grand Prix) was in the past. It encourages community racers to watch Grand Prix events, and helps unite the entire Zwift racing community.
Zwift/ZADA/IndieVelo
Zwift’s ZADA has, for years, been responsible for verifying performances in high-level Zwift events. Originally a community-powered initiative, it was dissolved due to privacy issues, then returned in 2019 as an official Zwift governing body. It is referenced throughout Zwift’s official Cycling Esports Ruleset.
I’ve been wondering what was happening with ZADA for the past few months, after learning that ZADA’s former chairman (George Gilbert) had launched indieVelo, a race-focused indoor cycling platform. Who would take the reins at ZADA moving forward?
Turns out, it’s still going to be George Gilbert, as well as former ZADA team leader Bjoern Ossenbrink. Zwift told elite Team Managers on August 11:
“For 2023/24, we will continue to work with Dr. George Gilbert and Bjoern Ossenbrink from indievelo (previously part of ZADA), who will provide an independent governance and performance verification service for the ZGP on Zwift. This service will be delivering PV and governance solutions only.“
As I understand it, the indieVelo platform itself won’t be used for performance verification. Rather, Zwift is simply contracting with Gilbert and Ossenbrink, through the indieVelo corporate entity, to continue to do similar work as they’ve done in the past in verifying Zwift race performances.
Interesting times, indeed.
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UCI Selects MyWhoosh as Esports Worlds Host
The biggest news in cycling esports this week is the UCI’s announcement that they’ve selected MyWhoosh as their partner for the next three Esports World Championships (2024, 2025, 2026).
This may come as a surprise to Zwifters (and Zwift itself), given that Zwift has been the only platform to host Esports Worlds thus far, having hosted it for three years. I reached out to Zwift for an official statement, and they said:
Naturally, we are disappointed by this outcome but we are extremely proud of the three great World Championships we have delivered with the UCI to date.
Our commitment to grow the sport of cycling esports from community racing upwards and to further develop our elite racing product remains unchanged. We will continue to innovate and drive this new sport forward.
The Zwift community is the bedrock of cycling esports and we will continue to create top-level elite events, including a Zwift Championship, that showcase racing on Zwift and celebrate the best Zwift racers in the world. Stay tuned for more details to come!
Is this a major setback for Zwift? A sign that they’ve fallen from their lofty perch atop indoor cycling virtual mountain? Probably not. As DCRainmaker said in today’s post, “The point here being, everything about these selections are driven by money (and connections), not functionality or user bases.”
Zwift still possesses a pile of investor cash, but MyWhoosh, based in United Arab Emirates (UAE), is linked/backed by the government of UAE itself. And that government is not short on cash. Comparing the features and user bases of Zwift and MyWhoosh, one can only assume that the UCI made its decision based on financial motives.
Who knows? Three years from now we may find that MyWhoosh hosting Esports Worlds was a good thing for Zwift. First, it holds their feet to the fire. It may also allow Zwift to invest in other crucial projects that keep growing its user base, feature set, and hardware offerings, so the platform can continue dominating the indoor space.
Zwift Championships
Hidden in Zwift’s statement above re: Esports Worlds is a new event announcement: a “Zwift Championship”! What exactly is this? I have no idea, and Zwift isn’t sharing any info just yet. But my guess is, it will be a sort of “Esports Worlds” without all the UCI attachments.
Zwift, more than any other indoor cycling platform, knows how to organize a high-end racing event. With ZRL bigger than ever and the next Grand Prix series announced, we’ll probably see everything culminate in a Zwift Championship in early 2024.
Questions or Comments
Thoughts on anything above? Share below!
It’s a shame that they don’t focus on making it an experience for the users. They wouldn’t need to think about the UCI if they just made the game such that any team (subject to verification of results) has the potential to race their way up the leagues to the top, and the overall top teams get crowned. I don’t understand why they think we would enjoy watching select teams be able to do, for example, elimination formats, without it being something normal users can experience. If they would open up the ability to create events- the community would end up creating something better than UCI worlds. Zwifters should generate Zwift world champions, not UCI world champions.
I agree, when zwift moved away from qualifying to “selection” it created a situation I’m not comfortable with. Take the esport Olympics, zwift chose riders rather than ran qualifying. Tarnished the event as purely an exhibition level with zwift “Ambassadors” rather than an Olympics event.
Zwift quote further develop our elite racing product , this is a disappointment. I predict MyWhoosh buys Zwift.
Where can I access Zwift’s elite racing product?
It’s just Zwift. Zwift is Zwift, and within it, there are elite races.
Zwift Championships is such a good idea. A big middle finger to the UCI. I really hope the riders come to it and escape the tyranny and corruption of the UCI, sadly we see the same corruption with British Cycling in the UK, allowing themselves to be used as a sportswashing vehicle by major polluters and climate-denying fossil fuel giants Shell.
The UCI has also given the Worlds to the UAE – cant imagine hardly anyone amateur will go there for the Gran Fondo championships – riders should stand up for those LGBT riders (and boycott it) who undoubtedly won’t be welcome.
I’ve had a few rides and races on MyWhoosh. They run a Tuesday Tune-up series which is well-designed as far as course selection goes. But there are no grades. So unless you are a high B or A grade rider you have no hope. Otherwise the MyWhoosh worlds are pretty good – good graphics, roads, backgrounds, etc. but the rider physics are off. At least in Zwift it does its best to make sure riders don’t occupy the same space at the same time. In MyWhoosh you seemingly pass directly through other riders without any regard to their presence. MyWhoosh need to improve a lot to catch up to Zwift in rider physics and the rider experience, but their world and route variety is quite good.
My whoosh may have graphics and money but that is it. Others programs had that but they collapsed due lack of users and events. Their needs to be a lot more to do for them to beat zwift. Zwift can fix graphics with some work. Just bring more money from sponsors, lower monthly cost to get more users, more investor’s. Then zwift expand some maps out a bit more (watopia, makuri, Scotland). Then fix getting supplies out globally better. If my whoosh buys zwift, LGBTQ+ club will over within a month max. You can assume some other clubs will taken out as well to confirm to new owners culture. Then other popular events goes bye bye too. My whoosh will try to force their culture views onto the greater population of virtual cyclists around the world. There are major issues with that. Looked at their website route preview page and see mostly to all flat- rolling routes. Not even a epic or Innsbruck or possible Leith/Keith climbs. So my whoosh still has way to go there for moderate- long climbs. No climb portal either. Zwift doing yearly champs is excellent idea. Do it like gravel community M, W, & NB as that will show the UCI how to do inclusion the proper way. It will be like gravel irl with the community one that we widely accept going on for years. Rather then some half ass knock off UCI one. As the IRL events in the Middle East in the UAE it will like was some years back a flat windy crit with little to no spectators there in person. Other events will be a joke. No parties going on. But UCI got their big check and UAE got a sportwashing events then just move on after the greater world does not care to show up in the numbers they want. Then trying to fix the damages from these years after the deal runs out. All of this is coming from the top not grass roots so no numbers of people supporting long term which is required sustainability of sport.
It’s fine to pretend it’s about ‘connections’ not functionality (etc.) but the truth is Zwift has had stability issues, especially under load, even for UCI events which should have merited super-duper redundancy and resources even just on a temporary scale. The one that jumps out to me is that the coverage that was pointed to as ‘official’ of some of the races cut out between the last 2 km and the line. That’s just unacceptable.
It’s not entirely unfamiliar territory to seasoned Zwifters, so the right thing to do here is to see, and acknowledge, that Zwift needs to do better if it wants to keep anyone who has any choice. UCI has less choice than most and still found a better, in their mind, option.
If there’s anything I know, it is how American based sports organise and declare their own World championships. Baseball, Nfl etc. Zwift World Championships must be able to be held. You would be a champion of that particular platform/game.There were unofficial gravel world championships held by American organisations before uci got involved. Interesting. Will be good to have Zwift focus on general user experience than having to invest cash in something every year for the Uci.
I actually hope this is a real bonus to MyWhoosh and makes them up their game. Zwift have become complacent IMO for a long time as they’ve had the market share of virtual riders. A bit of healthy competition can shake them up and give riders more of what they want than spoon feed them things like limited access to map choice etc.
There’ll be all sorts of issues if a UAE Team Emirates rider wins the title on MyWhoosh, given the shared ownership of the two.
Ultimately I don’t think anyone’ll really care about which platform has the worlds or not. If eMotorsport is anything to go by it could be a poisoned chalice, where the virtual Le Mans 24 hours was slammed by Max Verstappen & others for some embarrassing issues, and generally putting rFactor2 on blast. Though his deal with EA Sports was announced a couple of weeks after, so that could have an impact. So maybe MVdP, Geraint Thomas or any of the other riders that appear in Zwift ads might start talking smack about MyWhoosh during the worlds.
The graphics for MyWhoosh just seem to hit the nasty end of “uncanny valley” where it all looks quite shiny, but the cycling animations seem weird and lifeless and a lot of the textures look flat with dodgy shadows, so it doesn’t really appeal to me as a casual “non-racer who might join a race for a jersey or a badge, then not care if I come dead last”.
Other platforms are better than Zwift for all sorts of things, be it training, racing etc. but I enjoy Zwift because it’s a good replacement for me riding around in the rainy flat fens all winter, with lots of gamification for my riding, and the odd group ride/series like TdZ.
While MyWoosh seems like a nothing-burger to me, I also don’t think it’s going to result in any change in Zwift’s rate of development. Zwift updates and improvements are rate-limited by a pile of legacy, spaghetti code. Adding more resources to fix it probably isn’t going to speed that up – they just need time. (and I do have faith they’ll come around – we’ve seen more progress from them in the last year than since I joined c.2018)
The less you think of MyWoosh, the more this move by the UCI should concern you.
( ‘Nothing-burger’ is VERY 2018. 🙂 )
Nobody in the UCI room who tried to make the argument for Zwift prevailed — because Zwift failed to deliver in one or many ways.
We’ve also seen some moves which suggests there might be an increasing argument/strategy at Zwift to lock people in, via closed hardware and feature-locked software for instance, presumably so as to leverage any historical advantage they have had. The next bit is data lock-in. This is almost a classic approach and to my mind, a desperate one doomed to fail, even when bigger and smarter companies try to do it. The fact that this strategy is becoming more compelling is pretty annoying and concerning though.
. And locking people in reeks of desperation.
Zwift Lev57 from China. I’m interested in trying different platforms. But China mainland can’t connect to mywhoosh. Contacted via email and mywhoosh replied to me saying that I need to use VPN. I don’t think this is the right solution though, I whould continue to use zwift until I reach full level.