Zwift Insider Tiny Race Stats 2023: Rider Counts, Naughty Countries, Prolific Racers

August 16, 2023

LAST UPDATED August 6, 2024

With over a year of Tiny Races under our belt, it’s time to crunch some numbers and share fun Tiny Race stats. How many riders participate each week? Which country is home to the most well-behaved riders (and the naughtiest)? And who has completed more Tiny Races than any other rider on Earth?

Let’s dive in and find out!

Overall Numbers

With Tiny Race results saved through October 15, 2022, we’ve got 10 months of weekly data to work with. Here are the total number of races finished each week, broken down by the three event timeslots we run (2am, 8am, and 2pm Pacific time):

Zones 1 and 2 track quite closely to each other, with zone 1 being popular in the UK/Europe and zone being popular in the US/Canada. Zone 3 is always much smaller. While Zone 3 mostly exists to cater to Australia and New Zealand, it’s interesting to note that race completions have dropped off during the southern hemisphere’s winter, indicating that 1) Aussies and Kiwis don’t Zwift more in the winter and/or 2) a good portion of Zone 3’s racers aren’t in the southern hemisphere.

Next, we look at how many unique riders participated each week, combined across all three zones. We see a similar trend to the chart above, with numbers decreasing in summer months:

We peaked at 1278 riders on February 18, which was the second week of our special Worlds Experience races.

Next, we wanted to break down participation by location. Which countries participate the most in Tiny Races?

No surprise that the USA is first and Great Britain second, but if we look closer, ZwiftPower breaks out England, Scotland, and Wales as separate countries. If you add their numbers to Great Britain’s, GB is far and away the most Tiny Racing country!

Race Finishers and Rule-Breakers

As you may (or may not) know, the Tiny Races have a rather unique “no sniping” rule which we instituted in late 2022. The intention of the Tiny Races is to do 4 back-to-back hard races in one hour, but we found some riders were jumping into races (especially later races of the 4) so they could get a better result against riders who had accumulated fatigue from earlier races.

So we made a rule: once you skip a race of the 4, you can’t come back. If you do, your results in those later races will be marked with a shameful “DQ” in ZwiftPower.

So how many disqualifications do we issue? A lot, sadly:

We’ve noticed a consistent trend, though: Zone 1 gets less DQs than Zone 2, who gets less than Zone 3. Why? We’re not sure.

Disqualification Rates by Zone:

Zone 1: 8.14%
Zone 2: 9.05%
Zone 3: 10.62%

Going further down the rulebreaking rabbit hole, here’s a list of countries whose riders participate in the Tiny Races, sorted by who is naughtiest (or nicest, depending on how you look at it). This shows the percentage of race finishes which end up being disqualified for breaking the rules. (Keep in mind you have to be registered on ZwiftPower to even show up in the results, so this chart – and all of the charts on this page – leaves out data from riders who aren’t on ZP.)

Colombia makes quite a showing with their 36.97% DQ rate. But this is only out of 119 total race finishes, so it could be skewed by just one or two particularly naughty riders. The bigger surprise is Italy being the second-naughtiest at 17.71%, since that country accounts for 1993 race finishes. Che sorpresa!

Kudos to Romania for having the lowest overall DQ percentage. Also, a shout out to the good people of Sweden, who have the fourth-lowest DQ rate at just 5.39% from a whopping 6514 race finishes.

It’s not easy to finish all 4 Tiny Races, with each race being a sort of VO2 interval followed by a sprint! How many riders are able to finish all 4 races each week?

Categories A, B, and C are pretty close, sitting around an 80% completion rate. Category D struggles more, partly due to lower fitness levels but also due to some scheduling snafus on our part, where early races went a bit long and riders couldn’t finish and get in the pens for the next race. You can see we’ve improved in that area in recent months.

Which categories were the most popular?

A, B, and C are quite similar in size. We’re especially stoked to see all the A riders participating since that indicates the Tiny Races are a well-respected event among Zwift’s top racers.

D category has less than half the race completions of the other categories. This isn’t surprising, though, given the global stats we see for Zwift races.

Most Prolific Riders

Lastly, we wanted to see which individual riders had races the most Tiny Races. The results amazed us! (These numbers don’t include any races where the rider was DQ for any reason):

Amazing numbers from Nozaki, who is ranked 27th in the A category and has completed over 4000 Zwift races.

Looking a bit deeper, 40 riders have successfully completed 100 or more Tiny Races. Awesome!

Wrapping It Up

The Tiny Races evolved quite a bit over the past year, thanks largely to feedback from racers worldwide. Thank you for trusting us enough to race our races and share your feedback. It means a lot.

As we head into peak Zwifting months, we’re looking forward to the Tiny Races being more popular than ever. Stay tuned as we roll out new routes, and perhaps even some prize giveaways and midweek race times!