Innsbruck Course Recon Rides Shared on Strava

July 28, 2018

LAST UPDATED July 28, 2018

As we’ve often seen just prior to a new Zwift course being released, Jon Mayfield and Eric Min have both shared recon rides of the soon-to-be-released Innsbruck course. (See Jon’s ride here and Eric’s ride here.)

Thanks to these rides and some sleuthing from other Zwifters, we have a lot more details about what this new world holds for us. Here is my best guess at the five routes which Innsbruck will offer:

2018 UCI Worlds Course Short Lap – 23.7km (14.7 miles), 494m (1620′): this is just a portion of the 2018 Worlds course which will be raced in September. For Worlds, the men’s elite racers will begin their race in Kufstein and ride 84.7km to Innsbruck, where they will cover this circuit 7 times. The final circuit (not part of the Zwift course at this time) is a modified one which includes an additional climb featuring 25% gradients!
Achterbahn – 47.4km (29.5 miles), 988m (3241′): Figure 8 course which covers the UCI Worlds Course in both directions.
Innsbruckring – 8.8km (5.5 miles), 77m (252′): Flat circuit course, similar to Watopia Flat but with a bit more elevation.
Lutscher – 24.2km (15 miles), 827m (2713′): Loop around the climb portion of the course, which finishes each lap at the KOM arch: The distance of the loop itself is about 15km; the 24.2 includes the lead-in.
Lutscher CCW – 22.1km (13.7), 826m (2710′): Same as above but in reverse (this is way steeper, as evidenced by the shorter total distance)

(Thanks to Jesper Rosenlund Nielsen and Søren Anderson who shared the above info.)

An interesting note: Jon Mayfield’s ride matches up to a virtual ride segment titled “Tacx T2058.94 2018 World Championship Innsbruck – Main Climb“. This segment includes rides from December 2017 (and possibly earlier), so my guess it is was created as a Strava virtual ride segment by users of Tacx’s Trainer Software. This is the first time we’ve seen this, as far as I can tell: two different virtual training platforms sharing a Strava segment! Leaderboards could get interesting if, for example, one platform didn’t replicate the climbs accurately.