Season 2 of the 2021/22 Zwift Premier League runs from January 10th to February 14th. As a quasi-contributor to Zwift Insider and a rider/director of a newly promoted Premier League team, I wanted to give an unfiltered behind-the-scenes look at the action. Look for a recap each week here on Zwift Insider.
Race 3 of the Premier League started with a bit of GCN coverage of the Velocio team (watch the full GCN stream here). Our fashion crimes and mostly unsuccessful aggressive racing have made us pretty visible. The team standings have us right at the line of relegation and we are on pace to be AFC Richmond in Season 1 of Ted Lasso. If I was to cast each of our team members as someone in the show, I would cast them as follows:
- Ryan Atkins as Sam Obisanya. Supremely talented,principled, and impossibly nice.
- Charles McCarthy as Higgins. Underappreciated talent and a foundation of the institution.
- Jason Frank as Jamie Tart. Only problem here is Jason wouldn’t want to play Jamie Tart, why would he want to be anyone other than himself?
- Dan Cassidy as Keeley Jones. Sassy, looks good in a dress, super talented and is bound for bigger and better things.
- KBH – I don’t fit a singular character but I would describe myself as “If Ted Lasso and Roy Kent had a baby”.
This week’s race was on the NYC Park Perimeter Loop. A rolling course with 4 total sprints that doubled in value every lap. This led to some interesting tactical decisions on how to best score points. Basically earlier points would likely be less competitive but also less rewarding. The last lap points came right before the finish so going for those would cook you for the finish, to quote Dave Towle “it was the Gambler’s Prime”. The unique point structure made it exciting to nerd out on the best strategy to attack this race.
As soon as the race started it became clear this was going to be a more traditional race. After a very aggressive week 1 and 2, we saw little in the way of breakaways. Moves were given no leash. I think the power of the downhill killed most breakaway gaps, but we also had a pack dynamic bug that might have changed how fast the pack was. Apparently the pack dynamics were the old dynamics which historically made breaks impossible. From what Zwift told us, the server was running the new dynamics but all of our clients were running the old dynamics. So what we saw on screen in game and where we actually were wasn’t accurate. We learned about this because the visual of the winner and the actual winner were quite different. When things are very, very close it is common to have a small discrepancy because what happens on the server and is then shown to the client has some lag. But this time, it was bike lengths, not tire widths.
Margins of Truth
And this brings up something I want to talk about in Zwift racing. Accuracy, error, and cheating!
I know many people in the Zwift racing community hate to talk about cheating because it tears down what can be fantastic, and dare I say it, real racing. The assumption many cyclists make is that zwift is so fast because everyone is cheating. I think there is some truth to that, but not in the Premier League. I think we are seeing pretty fair racing. What isn’t talked about is the limitations of current technology and the gray area it opens up.
Out in the community races poorly calibrated power meters, wheel on trainers, patently false weights, and ZPower run rampant. It can be a bummer but there is no money on the line and no major rules against it. It can be the wild west but it can also make for some hard training.
In the Premier League there are weigh-ins 2 hours before the race. You have to use a trainer with at least 2% accuracy as your primary power source. You need a secondary power meter to check your trainer power data. You have to do a workout with a series of max efforts to create a power profile you are capable of, in addition to getting a record of how your trainer and power meter work. This substantially reduces the riff-raff.
So how are they cheating? I think they mostly aren’t. What we are seeing is what +/-2% accuracy looks like. It doesn’t sound like much. But when everyone is so close in performance, these small differences can be race-changing. So what do I mean by
+/-2%? We all like to assume all of our devices work as intended. I think what most of us believe is our own scale reads too high, our own power meter reads too low and everyone else’s is the opposite. But in truth there is a variance from trainer to trainer and brand to brand. What is stated as 1% accurate might be true for the test unit, but is it for all units in all batches? We make a lot of assumptions that everything works as they say it works.
In reality, some units will read high, some low. The hope is a separate power meter should shed light on whether or not a unit is off, but the power meters have the same variance. So what does 2% look like? At an FTP of 400 that’s 8 watts. The difference between 400 and 408 FTP is huge. That is the entirety of gains I can expect to see in a season of training. But in esports, that can just be the trainer you use. Compared to an unlucky competitor with a low reading trainer, you can have two people with the same FTP that are racing with an effective power difference of 392w to 408w. Compounding this with possible bodyweight scale error, we can see some wild variation without any actual physical differences. It should also be said the generally accepted dual variance is 5%! So double the difference stated above.
So what happens is a new gray area of manipulation. Most of the Premier racers all know this. Most of us just use what we have and hope it is close. Calibrate, use as intended, pay attention to any wild changes. Newer units tend to be better. But there are also those that change sources often and “fish” for the highest reading products. Maybe because they are just playing the game, or maybe because they’ve deluded themselves into believing the highest numbers possible are their real numbers. There are prominent teams with trainer sponsors that don’t use their sponsor’s product. But I must admit, how do we know what the real numbers are? Again, we assume the highest dual recording number is right for us and the lowest dual recording number is right for others. The truth is, we don’t know.
So what is okay and what is not? I switched to a waxed chain and saw about a 1% increase in trainer power. If I wanted to get divorced I could buy a $1000 ceramic derailleur cage too. What about using a sauna or getting an enema before weigh-in? How about sandbags on your trainer? They are all weird but if you want to do them, have at it.
To me the clearly wrong behavior is using something you know is reading high willingly. If you have to adjust the slope of your power meter to match your trainer you are cheating. If you manipulate your data from the trainer to the game, you are cheating. If you try and tune the calibration of your trainer/PM to read high, you are cheating.
All of these things are hard to prove, I think. But since everyone in the PL is an excellent cyclist, these small gains turn in some phenomenal wt/kg numbers and this is where people have gone wrong. Riders doing numbers off the Coggan chart (a historical chart that ranks human cycling performance) or showing substantial gains in performance in short periods of time. Recently one of the top-ranked Zwifter women in the world was banned precisely for this. In 8 months she got 35% better and put numbers off the Coggan chart. I don’t think they could ever prove how she did it, but the numbers were so unbelievable, they were simply, not believable.
In outdoor racing, no one has ever been banned for incredible performances. There are many out there that should have been, but it only happened because of drug testing, police raids, or whistle-blowers.
In esports, we are number generators. The sport is the numbers and how they are made and what they are is where the cheating happens. Anti-doping in outdoor racing has bio passports. If something changes wildly they can look into foul play. In esports we have power profiles and when performances improve wildly we can assume foul play.
Many elite riders can be world-beaters in esports with the right equipment and world-beaters can be average with the wrong. The best will always have extra scrutiny and it is important to remember racers are mostly just hoping their equipment is working as intended. So when the game client and the server have a hard time showing who won a race where 25 people finished within 1 second of each other, just remember all those numbers that got them there vary by many times more than that winning margin.
Chasing the Gambler’s Prime
Back to the race. Our team split up the primes to give our best chance at points. There never ended up being any easy sprints though. The plan for myself was to sit in and go all out for the Gambler’s Prime. Jason would focus on the finish. Each of the laps I practiced the positioning into the sprint without going all out. I was trying to get a feel of where I needed to jump and from where in the pack I would start that jump. I quickly learned an early jump was causing a separation from the pack, but the front of that split got swarmed. So I needed to make that early surge but not hit the front till 200m to go.
The only move to make it to the points was Leandro Messineo – WeZ Oral. He launched a vicious attack after Harlem Hill and held on to take top points. On the stream he was in the orange the whole time and my team Discord was wowed by the move. It was unbelievable. Turns out, it was. His result was annulled by ZADA this week. WeZ Oral is not happy and is fighting it.
Esports is a new world, people are judged on their numbers. Zwift is numbers. In his ZADA test, his best 4 min effort was 400w. In the race he did 447w for 3.5 minutes. You can’t judge intent, but a 10% performance gain is not reasonable. I commend ZADA for acting on something that clearly didn’t pass the sniff test. The fact that they do this actually supports the other amazing performances we see, because it implies it believes in them.
After committing myself to a passive race of boredom the last lap meant game on for me. I focused on my plan and made the early jump and followed wheels into the sprint. I hit the front at about 300m however, and I just couldn’t hold it. Those with more patience/watts came roaring by and I went from 2nd to 5th. I made the points, but they fell off hard. First was worth 40 points but my 5th was worth 4. I did my best 30-second power ever (by 2.5%, not 12%) and my positioning was pretty good. I was just beaten by better riders and that’s okay, this field has a lot of those.
Attempting to come around. 
Coming around. 
Out of gas.
This left us with a huge gap on the field and Ollie Jones – Canyon made a solo move to the line. I wanted to go but got greedy thinking I could sprint once more. The brave thing to do was to go for it. I am mad at myself for being weak. He ended up being caught but that is the style of racing I really respect. Kudos to him for sending it.
In the final sprint I focused on all the right things and had good timing but the power was gone. It was pathetic and I finished 40th, 0.6 seconds out of the points. Jason had another monster sprint and finished 9th. The team placed 11th and we continue to sit just above the line of relegation. Hopefully Jamie Tart doesn’t swap teams and knock us out.
Next week is the TTT and a chance to see how our watts and communication stack up. I am excited for it.
In honor of the Ted Lasso funeral episode: http://www.ZwiftHoF.com
wpDiscuz
