Zwift Strava Segment News: New Short Segments + 10 Verified Segments

November 25, 2024

LAST UPDATED November 25, 2024

Strava has made some welcome changes involving Zwift segments in recent days. And while most of the comments on this post will probably be from Zwifters complaining about the company’s recent API TOS changes, I still want to take the time to share this totally unrelated news, since it’s something I’ve been asking for for years!

Dive into the details below…

New Verified Segments

Earlier this month, Strava announced their new verified Segments. They say verified segments “help highlight the iconic stretches of road and trail where the community competes. Strava inspects segments from our segments database, identifies which are the most representative of the road or trail, and verifies them. This feature aims to reduce confusion and improve the accuracy of the world’s most popular segments.”

Real outdoor segments will benefit more from verification changes than Zwift segments because popular outdoor roads tend to have lots of segments that are similar but with slightly different endpoints, confusing names, etc. Zwift segments, on the other hand, are mostly only created by us here at Zwift Insider, so you don’t have to deal with the segment duplication issue.

These newly verified segments are basically the most iconic segments on Zwift. Strava asked us to send them the top 10 segments to be verified, so I worked with some folks at Zwift HQ to select the top 10 based on segment popularity (stars, goals, completions) and other factors.

Without further ado, here’s the list of Zwift’s first verified Strava segments, with my comments:

Alpe du Zwift: by far the most starred Zwift segment, plus it’s the game’s most iconic climb. No question it’s gotta be #1.
Volcano KOM: surprisingly the 2nd most starred segment in game!
Epic KOM: 3rd most starred.
Mont Ventoux KOM: 4th most starred.
Box Hill KOM: 5th most starred.
Hilly KOM: 8th most starred, and where it all began on Watopia. Seems fitting.
Tempus Fugit: second-most starred full route on Zwift, and most attempts of any route in Zwift in last 365 days.
Fuego Flats Forward Sprint: we figured it would be cool to have one sprint segment in the list. This is the most starred and most attempted segment in the last 365 days.
Volcano Circuit: 7th most efforts in the last 365 days, and most starred of any route on Zwift!
PRL Full: the last segment was the toughest to pick, but we thought it would be cool to verify the longest route on Zwift on the list.

You’ll see a checked badge next to the name of any verified segment you complete will show at the top of your list of PRs when viewing ride results.

New Short Segments

If you’ve followed this site for long you may have noticed me complaining about Strava requiring segments to be at least a certain length. When Zwift first began, that minimum length was quite small – somewhere between 100-200 meters. Then a few years later, Strava bumped it up to 300 meters, meaning we couldn’t create a Zwift segment for a 290-meter sprint.

Then sometime in 2022, Strava increased the minimum again, to 500 meters! That’s when I got really frustrated and wrote this Zwift Insider post as well as this post on Strava’s community hub. Why was I frustrated? Because there are a lot of important short segments needed on Zwift, and minimum segment lengths don’t make sense on virtual platforms where GPS data is always accurate.

Then a few weeks ago, I found myself on a call with a couple of folks from Strava and Zwift. I asked if there was some way they could give Zwift Insider’s Strava account special permission to create shorter segments, and a few days later… they did!

I quickly got to work, creating all those missing short segments that had piled up over the years. Here’s are the short segments I’ve created since then:

What’s Next?

There are still a few things I’d love to see Strava do to improve their experience for Zwifters. Here’s my list, in order of priority:

Automatically Remove Ridiculous Efforts from the Leaderboards: this is a tough nut to crack, but it would also provide the most value for Strava and Zwift users. Segment leaderboards currently contain a lot of spurious efforts, and these need to be removed. Read more >
Overlay Zwift Map for Zwift Activities: ten years after Zwift launched and thousands of people were riding on some island in the middle of the Pacific, the situation hasn’t changed on Strava. Our maps still show the real-world islands, and not Zwift’s maps that could easily be overlayed on top. Read more >
Enable Zwift Segment Backfilling: if you create a new IRL Strava segment, their system will “backfill” the segment with any matching rider activities from the past. But this doesn’t happen on Zwift. When I create a new Strava segment, only Zwift rides that happen on that same or later days will match (with some occasional and odd exceptions). Strava says this is because it’s too big of a load on their systems to backfill with so many Zwift activities on a small number of roads.
Disallow Segment Flagging: users can currently flag Zwift segments as hazardous, which is just silly. Virtual segments shouldn’t be flaggable as hazardous. Read more >

Most of these were shared with Strava contacts on recent calls, and while I can’t share where exactly Strava is at with each issue, I’m hoping we’ll see some movement on them soon!