Lucianotes: Would your ZRL team adopt me?

I see many people introducing themselves on WTRL’s Facebook page in order to find a ZRL Season 4 team. As I am also looking for a team, I’ve spent the last few days struggling to find the right balance in my presentation: being honest, genuine, not exaggerating but not minimizing qualities and flaws. This is important because in the end, entering a ZRL team is like entering a brotherhood. 

So, even if being half-French half-Argentinian makes me the closest thing to perfection a human being can be – kind of a semi-deity if you think about it objectively – I need to put some perspective on it. Though five volumes of 3000 pages would only scratch the surface of my wonderfulness, I have tried to make a comprehensive list consolidating pros and cons you, basic human beings, would enjoy and suffer if I am racing with you. How should I present myself to potential teammates?

1. I search for ALL the info regarding all the stages, circuits, and all the teams and racers we are competing against, which helps the team to be prepared for any circumstance occurring during the race. That is the good part of my pathology. The bad part is that I do equally extensive, exhaustive and sometimes unbearable debriefs with the results of the race and have a tendency to create bad faith justifications to explain why things didn’t go as expected. Crossing the finish line is not the end of the race!

2. I love to talk on the Telegram or Discord group about anything happening in the Zwift and the IRL cycling world: sharing news, articles, links, videos. I don’t even mind no one answering or even making fun of me when I say I am an absolute Bernard Hinault fan and I regularly watch the documentaries recollecting his 70s and 80s wins. But if you are not interested in the topic, it can be a nightmare being overwhelmed by the amount of useless data I share. Good thing is that I don’t take it personal if someone shouts “STOP IT, LUCIANO!!! NOBODY CARES!! YOU ARE EMBARRASSING YOURSELF!!!”

3. I love passionate debates and most of the time it is super fun. Downside, I have somewhat of an unlimited memory regarding what is said or not during those debates, so I can be the one reminding you that you are saying the exact opposite of something you said 7 years ago and point at your intellectual incoherence. I understand this is extremely annoying, but I can’t help it. 

4. I was a decent B racer in ZRL Season 2, but upgraded to A in April. I have not raced seriously for a while on Zwift so Zwiftpower currently indicates I am “B Almost A”. However, in my IRL P20 tests I am substantially above the B threshold, so in all fairness I have to compete in A. So I am a terrible A now. I am extremely resilient and never surrender, which is another way of saying that my contribution to an A team is going to be more on the team dynamics side than in the number of points I would bring to the team during the competition.

5. I am right all the time. I am French: this is self-explanatory. I am right, everybody else is wrong, full stop. End of the discussion. I don’t even know how to categorize this one. Pro or con? 

6. I write regularly about the team experience in Zwift Insider, so I might expose your most shameful and inadmissible secrets to the 2.7 billion people reading my articles here. 

7. I am a team player. I have zero issues sacrificing myself for the greater good of the collective. So if the team captain decides I should be thrown for breakfast to the Titans Grove T-Rex as a diversion, so the leader of our team can attack while the pack is watching my dismemberment, so be it! I’d rather die a hero than live a coward! (I mean in a virtual cycling world at least, not sure about it IRL.)

8. I love to DS as much as I love to race. Again, for the team, it has its pros and cons, as I can easily get excited and saturate the sound of the Discord channel shouting and celebrating, or complaining as if our lives were depending on you finishing 37th instead of 38th. If the vague idea that 37th and 38th is the same crossed your mind now, then definitely you and I will have a problem.

9. As you may have understood by now, I have zero capacity to be moderate. I only have two shades of gray and those are Black and White. I use superlatives even to describe the yearly routinary summer migration of the Beluga whales from North Alaska to the Canadian Beaufort Sea. The good part of it is that I stand by my teammates with the same integrity and unconditionality. 

So, all in all. If I had to summarize all of this on a Facebook post, what am I left with? Would the following work? 

Would you adopt me into your ZRL Team?