Will tomorrow’s Thanksgiving Day Ride be Zwift’s biggest ever?

As I write this, tomorrow’s Thanksgiving Day Ride (hosted by Zwift CEO Eric Min, with special guest Mathieu van der Poel) has 5,406 riders signed up.

The ride is scheduled for 4pm UTC/11am EST/8am PST, and you can sign up here.

I haven’t seen this many riders on a single ride in quite a while, and was curious how this compared to past events. So I reached out to Zwift and asked for the 5 largest events ever held on Zwift. Here’s that list:

A few things worth noting about this list:

• It’s based on actual ride participants, which differs from a signup count or a finisher count.
• Two of the events were in January 2021, the busiest month in Zwift’s history due to the COVID-driven subscriber influx. In fact, the highest Peak Zwift number ever would be set just two weeks later: 49,114 concurrent riders on January 19, 2021!
• The first 4 events all happened in early January, which is always each year’s “peak Zwift” time.
• All the events happened within a 4-hour time window (14:00-18:00 UTC), which makes sense, because this is a time when riders in Europe/UK and the Americas can often ride. In fact, if you remove the last event, the first four all happened within an hour of each other (17:00-18:00 UTC)!
• The INEOS Group Ride is the outlier here, since it happened in April instead of January, and at a slightly earlier time of day than the others. This particular event was actually one of three INEOS Group Rides that day, and if you combined all of those events, my guess is they hosted well north of 10,000 riders. Why were these rides so popular?
  • Team INEOS’ Egan Bernal had won the Tour de France in 2019
  • COVID lockdowns were in effect all over the world
  • The event was well-advertised across cycling media

How Big Will It Get?

Last year’s Thanksgiving Day ride had 3,562 participants, but no headline guest. This year’s ride features MvdP, a generational phenom who, among other achievements, is the only rider in history to be the Men’s World Champion in three disciplines (Cyclocross, Road, and Gravel). So it’s no surprise that we’re already at (checks signups list) 5,436 signups, 24 hours before the event.

With signup counts often doubling in the last 24 hours before an event, will tomorrow’s Thanksgiving Day celebration be the biggest group ride ever on Zwift?

We’ll know soon enough. I’ll be there, along with lots of friends and big names in the world of Zwift. (So far, the signup list includes 58 riders I follow… but the Companion app only lets me see the first 20 names on that list. When events get this big, it becomes clear that Zwift’s UI isn’t tailored for 5,000-rider events!)

Join Us!

The ride is 60 minutes long and held on the new Spinfinity route in New York. This route begins and ends on the new Times Square Circuit, taking riders down to Brooklyn via the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. Since the route is only 19.3km long and quite flat, we’ll complete close to 2 laps in an hour.

Sign up at zwift.com/events/view/5187956