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

August 7, 2024

LAST UPDATED August 6, 2024

With another year of Tiny Races under our belt, it’s time to crunch some numbers and share fun Tiny Race stats. How would recent numbers compare to last year’s stats? What do the week-to-week participation trends look like? 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 Data

With Tiny Race results saved since October 15, 2022, we’ve got over 21 months of weekly data to work with. Here are the total number of races finished each week since I began saving the data. This is broken down by time zone into the three event timeslots we run (Zone 1 at 2am, Zone 2 at 8am, and Zone 3 at 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 1636 riders on February 18, 2023, which was the second week of our special Worlds Experience races.

This Year’s Data

If we narrow our scope to the past 12 months (August 2023 through July 2024) we can simplify the charts and concentrate on more recent trends.

One thing we’ve been doing for the past several months is experimenting with alternative ways to categorize riders. First we started moving the power windows, then Zwift Racing Score was released and we’ve been testing it, first with Zwift’s standard category bands, and now with our own custom bands.

Each of these tweaks affected the sizes of the categories. You’ll see the E category is finally getting some use now that we’re testing our Zwift Racing Score’s 5-category approach, and category sizes are closer than they’ve ever been before.

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

It may look like 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 edges the US as the most Tiny Racing country!

The Naughty List

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 later races in the set so they could get a better result against fatigued riders. Therefore, we developed a unique “no sniping” rule that basically says “You can’t skip a race then return.”

How many disqualifications do we issue to snipers? A lot, sadly:

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

Disqualification rates by zone for the past 12 months:

Zone 1: 6.83%
Zone 2: 9.09%
Zone 3: 9.58%

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) in the past 12 months. This shows the percentage of race finishes which end up being disqualified for sniping. (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.)

South Korea wins the award for being the naughtiest, followed by Russia. Both of these countries had relatively low participation rates, though, with around 250 race finishes for the year. And just like last year, Italy is the first major participant (over 2500 race finishes) to have a pretty bad score, averaging 12.5% disqualifications.

Kudos to Costa Rica for having the lowest overall DQ rate by a good margin. Also, a shout out to the good people of Sweden, who just like last year have the lowest DQ rate of any major participant, coming in at 5.6% with over 7000 race finishes.

Most Prolific Riders

Lastly, we wanted to see which riders had raced the most Tiny Races over the past year. The results are impressive, with last year’s most prolific rider maintaining their place at the top, averaging 7.2 Tiny Races per week. Nice work, Naofumi!

Looking a bit deeper, 67 riders have successfully completed 100 or more Tiny Races in the past year. Awesome!

Three Requests for Zwift

The Tiny Races have always pushed the boundaries of Zwift’s race events. For example: did you know we had to customize the events to only remind you of the next race 1 minute before it starts? This avoids riders getting reminders popping up as they near the finish of an earlier Tiny Race!

There are two features I’d love to see from Zwift because they would simplify the signup process and greatly reduce cheating in Tiny Races:

Sign up for all 4 events at once: I get it, the idea of signing up for 4 race events isn’t exactly intuitive. I’d love it if Zwift could design it so you do one signup, and you’re signed up for all 4 events. This would reduce confusion, and reduce the number of snipers.
Verify rider category when entering pen: if a rider signs up for an event in, say, the C category, then gets upgraded to a B before that event begins, Zwift still lets them join the C race. Zwift should verify riders’ current category before letting them enter the start pens. Signed up for to low a category? Just pop up a message and let them pick their new category.
Don’t automatically move riders to an event when they’re already in one: if you do get within that 1-minute time window, Zwift might pop up the reminder of your upcoming Tiny Race then take you out of your current race and into the next one before you’re finished. That’s not ideal. It seems like an easy fix: if the rider is currently in an event, don’t automatically take them out to the next one. Force them to choose that option. This is how it should work throughout Zwift.

Looking For More Numbers

Perhaps I have a fourth request.

As I crunched the stats above, I was reminded of how painfully difficult it is to extract useful event data from Zwift’s systems. (There’s so much other data I’d love to see, and I’m only able to generate the data above because I have it stored in a custom database which I use for crunching numbers and disqualifying snipers.)

As an event organizer, I would love to have access to a portal that shows me participation numbers, rider satisfaction scores/comments, and other stats from my events. This sort of actionable data would help me create a better experience for racers, which would be a win all around.

Wrapping It Up

The Tiny Races have always been about trying something different. I’m not particularly interested in holding “just another Zwift race,” which is why these races have such a unique setup. It’s also why I jump at the chance to test beta features like pack dynamics and custom category boundaries.

Thank you for trusting me enough to race the races and share your feedback. It means a lot.

As we head into peak Zwifting months, we’ll continue pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in Zwift racing. See you on course!