The Ultimate Zwift Games Elite Championships Preview

The following article is adapted from the Pro E Cycling preview of the elite Zwift Games. Pro E Cycling maintains a website with pro virtual cycling race results and a ranking system for pro riders. It also publishes a blog every Tuesday morning on all things virtual cycling. You can sign up for the blog (for free) on Substack here.

Well, here we are! Zwift Games started Saturday, March 8. At Pro E Cycling, we’ve decided to greet the biggest race series of the season with the longest most ambitious blog post of our existence.¹

Below is the table of contents for what you’ll find in this post. Feel free to use the links jump between sections, skip the boring bits, and leave your thoughts in the comment section below.

How to Watch and Official Resources

Starting with the simple stuff. Zwift Games will take place on three consecutive Saturdays in March:

• March 8 – Sprint Championships
• March 15 – Climb Championships
• March 22 – Epic Championships

All three championships will be broadcast on YouTube, and Zwift has set up an official Zwift Games Elite Hub where you can find all the YouTube links, start lists, results, and the fan guide.

The men and women will race consecutively for each championship, starting at 17:00 UTC each Saturday. Just to cater to our subscriber list, that translates to noon EST.

Got that? Good. Now the interesting stuff.

Format

Last year, the format was simple: the Sprint Championship used the well-trodden and easy-to-follow format of the 2023 UCI World Championships.¹ The Epic and Climb Championships were straight scratch races.

This year, Zwift has gotten a bit more creative. Most of the format I like.² But some aspects are too cute by half.

Sprint Championship

Format

The Sprint Championship is divided up into three separate races.

• The first race is 16.1 km/88m around Makuri Madness. Zwift calls this “Stage 1.”
• The second is 18.1 km/167m through Scotland Smash. Zwift calls this “Stage 2.”

Both of these races are scratch races. Riders will be awarded points based on their position at the finish, starting at 70 and descending by one until last place (so second gets 69 points, third 68, etc.). Each race also has an intermediate sprint location where the top three riders receive points (10-5-3).

After the first two races, the five riders with the most accumulated points will advance to what Zwift calls the “Sprint Showdown.” Importantly (you’ll see why later), this is not a “stage.”

• Sprint Showdown: 3.3 km/34m, a single lap around the famous Glasgow Sprint Circuit.

Whoever crosses the finish line first wins the Sprint Championship and the $3,000 that comes along with it.

Analysis

One of the critiques of last year’s Sprint Championship was that, well, it arguably wasn’t really a sprint championship. In particular, the second race (where riders needed to finish in the top 10 out of 30 to advance to the third and final race) included a climb of the Titan’s Grove Reverse KOM, a 0.9 km segment at 6.6% that (in the eyes of some) turned the stage into a bit more of a puncheur’s championship than a sprinter’s.

I think that concern was overblown – Titan’s Grove Reverse isn’t much longer than a one minute effort for the top men. To the extent that was an issue though, it’s been largely been fixed this year, but to be honest it’s a difficult balance to strike. Zwift can’t just put on a long, flat race: that’s boring. There needs to be some punchy segments to give the non-pure sprinters some hope, but not to the point where the nomenclature of a sprint championship no longer makes sense.³

I think they’ve done a good job striking the right balance this year. Stage 1 has a bit of a punch about two kilometers before the finish line, but it’s not really enough to drop the stronger sprinters – it’ll just mean the fireworks start earlier. Stage 2 includes the Clyde Kicker twice, Breakaway Brae once, and finishes with a slight uphill for the last 1.5 km. Advantage: puncheurs. Maybe? Slightly? It’s a good balance.

Glasgow Sprint Circuit is the perfect course for the final. Give the puncheurs a chance to attack at the Clyde Kicker, but for the sprinters who are able to hang on, they’ll be able to cross the line at the Champion’s Sprint with their hands raised above their heads (well, IRL, Zwift hasn’t programed avatars to do that… yet).

Climb Championship

Format

The Climb Championship will have the same structure as the Sprint Championship:

• The first race is Watopia’s Downtown Eruption (19.9 km/275m). This is “Stage 3.”
• The second is London Uprising (20.9 km/357m). This is “Stage 4.”
  • Just like with the Sprint Championship, each of these two stages will have an intermediate climb (Stage 3) or sprint (Stage 4) where additional points are awarded to the first three riders. Points at the finish line are the same as they were for the sprint.
• The “Climb Showdown” will feature the top 5 riders with the most points in Stages 3 and 4, and be on the new ZG25 Climb Champs course (5 km/156m). First across the line wins the Climb Championship and $3,000.

Analysis

This is a very different Climb Championship than last year, a scratch race up Alpe du Zwift. And as challenging and iconic as the Alpe is, I think it’s fair to say it doesn’t always produce the best racing. The women’s race last year was a bit of a snoozefest. Illi Gardner just sat at a slightly higher w/kg threshold for the entirety of the climb and finished 1:35 ahead of Emma Belfoth (who herself was 1:18 up on Gabriela Guerra in third).⁴

But if the question you are trying to answer is “who’s the best climber,” well, the Alpe is the right place to do it. And while I think this year’s format will produce more exciting racing, it certainly gives more room for puncheurs to shine.

Take Stage 3 for instance. There are two climbs in the stage. The first is the Volcano KOM. It’s a pretty quick 3.8 km at only 3.2% – a 5:30-6:00 minute effort for the top men. The stage ends with the Hilly KOM (0.9 km at 5.5%). This was the end of last year’s Epic Championship, where Neal Fryett completed the segment in a blistering 1:20 to win.

This is… not a climbing stage. It’s a 5 minute power test halfway through and a one minute power test to end. The same is true for Stage 4, which features the Fox Hill and Box Hill KOMs, both 5-minute power tests. Johan Norén has done the former in 4:36, and Lennert Teugels the latter in 5:11. The Climb Showdown final goes up Fox Hill again, and that’s that.

So all in all, I think calling this a “Climb Championship” isn’t really right. Matthieu van der Poel holds the record up the Poggio in 5:40. This format and these courses favor that style of rider.

Epic Championship

Format

Ironically, the Epic Championship is arguably more of a climbing test than the Climbing Championship. The format here is simple. It’s a scratch race, and here’s the course:

• ZG25 Queen. First off, great name right?⁵ Zwift calls this “Stage 5.”
  • The route is 44.8 km/894m. There are two intermediate KOMs with the same first-three-across-the-line scoring system as the earlier stages.

Analysis

Not a ton to say here. I like the route, and overall the Epic is my favorite championship. It’s the closest we have in the virtual world to an IRL road race, and while I definitely don’t want the whole sport to trend this way, there is something nostalgic about settling in for a longer race that takes time to develop.

It also produced the biggest upset of the inaugural Zwift Games last year, Fryett’s win over Teugels and Ollie Jones. I think there’s something about the longer races that puts virtual specialists justtt a little out of their comfort zones and creates space for these kind of results.⁶ I’m hoping we get something similar again.

Overall Championship

Format

The winner of the Overall Championship will take home $5,000, but no golden KICKR bike this year. Heartbreaking. That thing was sick. The top 30 riders will also be in the money this year, so there’s a bit more “spreading the wealth” and incentives to fight for positions even outside the top ten.

Overall standings will be calculated based on the points riders score across all five stages – both finish line points and intermediate sprint and KOM points. But because the Sprint and Climb “Showdowns” aren’t considered stages, those won’t count for anything for the Overall.

Analysis

A few thoughts here:

• It’s sort of dumb that the Sprint and Climb Showdowns don’t mean anything for the Overall. Sorry, but it should matter for the Overall which rider finishes first vs. fifth there.
• I love giving points for intermediate locations though. So smart. The “primes” last year – where riders won money rather than points – were never that exciting from a fan perspective. It was mostly riders who didn’t have a chance to win money at the finish line going for the primes, so they never mattered much for the overall race. But when the points matter for overall (and stage) standings? Game onnnnn.
• I also don’t like how undervalued the Epic becomes in this system. It’s literally worth half the sprint and climb races, since both of those are split into two stages and therefore award twice as many points. I’d prefer to see each championship count the same.

Qualification Criteria and Start List

When the initial start list came out, I published the full list and a detailed explanation of the qualification criteria.

You can check out that link for a more in-depth explanation, but in short at the time we thought there were two ways to qualify:

• First, be in the top 50 of the Zwift World Series standings after the first three stages or, failing that;
• Be one of the top five riders in a “second chance” race on February 22, intended to make up for the Zwift World Series getting cut short after just three of the five stages.

But, it turns out, there was another way!

• Wild cards (I think. But I don’t really know, since as far as I can tell, Zwift doesn’t make any of this public.)

When I published the above post, I noted that the main takeaways were that Freddy Ovett, the defending champion on the men’s side, and Kate McCarthy, the reigning world champion on the women’s side, hadn’t qualified. They did not qualify through the second chance race either. Yet… both are on the official start list published by Zwift. The same is true for U.S. national champion Hayden Pucker, who was 51st in the World Series standings after the third stage and on the outside looking in for Zwift Games.

So, what to make of this? Especially with Ovett and McCarthy, it seems like Zwift has exercised its discretion to issue wild cards to some higher-profile names, even if they didn’t meet the strict qualification criteria. In the above post, I noted that Zwift had never really closed the door on this possibility:

To qualify for the Zwift Games, riders would have to finish in the top 50 in the World Series overall standings. Zwift didn’t shut the door on additional riders beyond those 50 qualifying, but (again, as reported by Chris [Schwenker]) did say that “racing will be limited to 50-60 riders, with the aim of balancing entertaining racing, high field quality and access for riders.”

I strongly support this decision. As an initial matter, it makes sense to make some concessions after the fiasco of the World Series trainer malfunctions and cancellation of the final two stages, which some top riders had been relying on to qualify for Zwift Games. This is most true for McCarthy, who had a win taken away from her in Stage 2 because of a trainer issue outside of her control.

But even setting that aside, I’m sympathetic to reserving spots for top names even if they fell short of qualifying. The defending Zwift Games champion should be on the start line. So should the reigning world champion. If Ashleigh Moolman Pasio – who PCS has ranked as the 31st best female road cyclist ever – wants to show up for Zwift Games, by god let her in.⁷

(As an interesting side note, when Zwift officially announced the return of Zwift Games for this year, they promised us Moolman Pasio would be participating. They also promised us current men’s world champion Jason Osborne. But neither is on the official start list. Bummer.)

Anyway, platforms or race organizers retaining discretion to invite bigger names through wild card spots is nothing new. The UCI did something similar for the most recent esports world championship. And… it’s smart? If you care about growing the sport, there needs to be a sober recognition that some of the top names are not going to be able to prioritize minor virtual races – i.e., qualifiers – in their calendars. And that’s okay. We still want them there for the big races.

That being said: Zwift, can you at least be open about what you are doing?!? The above list I published was completely correct based on the announced qualification criteria,⁸ but as you’ll see below it seems like there have been a decent amount of discretionary tweaks. I’m assuming that, in addition to just making sure the biggest names were racing, some riders dropped out and Zwift filled the gaps with additional wild cards. Which they should do. But… it would be nice if there was some transparency here? Otherwise, we are just left guessing.

So with all that said, the start lists I published previously are correct, with the following changes when compared to the official Sprint Championship start lists:

In addition, the following riders have (provisionally) qualified through the second chance race since I published the initial start list post:

Prediction Game

Now the fun stuff!

Here’s the game: I’m going to rank the top ten riders, both men and women, based on the total number of points I think they’ll score in Zwift Games. So for example, last year Kathrin Fuhrer won on the women’s side with 295 points, followed by Gabriela Guerra in second with 293; Lou Bates in third with 290; and all the way down to Kristen Kulchinsky in sixth with 283 points.

On the men’s side, Ovett won with 280 points. So in this prediction game, the correct bingo card last year would’ve had Ovett – the men’s champion and proud owner of a freaking golden KICKR bike – in seventh.

I don’t know if this is the best way to “predict” Zwift Games. Or that I’ll do particularly well at it. But it’s certainly a little quirky, and that’s our niche. So let’s do it (bracketed numbers are the rider’s [current ranking/all-time ranking]):⁹

1) Kate McCarthy [3/11]

To start, I’m fairly confident that it’ll be a female rider at the top of this list. At the moment, the women’s virtual peloton is pretty top heavy. There are some incredible riders, but the top eight or so are a tier above the rest of the field. In contrast, the men’s peloton is a bit deeper, with maybe 15-20 riders in a similar tier.

The upshot of this is that the top women are more likely to consistently be in the top spots in each stage, whereas the men will shuffle around a bit more and score less points. This is precisely what happened this year, and I think it will happen again.

But to McCarthy specifically: she’s my pick to win Zwift Games on the women’s side. Her season thus far has been insane – she’s won the UCI World Championship, four of the five Sunday Race Club monthly finals in which she’s participated, and the only Zwift World Series race she entered she won but had the result annulled due to a trainer malfunction. Another way of saying all this is that, if you count the World Series win, McCarthy has won six of the seven pro races she’s entered this year.

That’s a crazy win rate, the likes of which we’ve never really seen since Freddy Ovett won four of five individual stages and the overall GC in the second season of the 2020-2021 Zwift Premier Division. Because our current ranking system accounts for results over the past two years, and her run has only started this season, McCarthy is still currently only ranked third in the world. But she’s by far and away been the best rider this season, and is the Pro E Cycling pick to win Zwift Games.

2) Gabriela Guerra [2/9]

3) Kathrin Fuhrer [1/1]

McCarthy has some intense competition. I’ve written previously about how much fun the rivalry between her, Guerra, and Fuhrer has been this season.

I won’t fully rehash that article here – this post is already way too long – but it’s worth explaining why I’ve got Guerra second and Fuhrer, the defending champion and current world #1, in third. The truth is… who the heck knows. These three are so, so close to each other. Of the ten pro races that have happened so far this season, one of this trio has won every one.

Recently though, Guerra has been slightly better than Fuhrer. In the past five Sunday Race Club monthly finals, Fuhrer has done okay: she’s finished in the top 10 each time, but she hasn’t managed to podium. Guerra, on the other hand, has been on the podium for each of those races. So I think right now Guerra is riding slightly better. But again, I could be totally wrong here.

4) Lou Bates [4/5]

And then there’s Lou Bates. I’m going to be honest here: Bates is my favorite rider to watch in the women’s peloton. She’s got the sort of “idgaf, I’m just gonna go for it” style of racing that is wildly entertaining, even if maybe not optimal from a strategic perspective.

There was a time not so long ago where Bates had a legitimate argument as the best rider in the world. She won Zwift Grand Prix last year, along with 3/4 of the individual stages in which she raced (and oh yeah, she finished second in the other one).

But recently, she’s been a step behind McCarthy, Guerra, and Fuhrer. I’m rooting for that to change here – Bates is one of the few pro riders that hasn’t really made her way over to MyWhoosh yet, so maybe racing on home turf will help – but realistically I have her finishing fourth on the women’s side.

5) Lennert Teugels [6/5]

And finally we get to the men. Last year, Teugels finished 29th in Zwift Games. But leading with that is pretty deceptive: he finished second in both the Epic and the Climb. But he didn’t race in the Sprint, and so was effectively eliminated from GC before the racing began.

This year, Pro E Cycling has Teugels as our pick for men’s Zwift Games champion. He hasn’t raced much this year – he was absent from the Zwift World Series, and is only on the start line because Zwift gave him a wild card – but he’s been on the podium in the only two Sunday Race Club finals he’s entered. And, critically, the only riders he’s lost to in those races were Michael Vink [3/8] and Jason Osborne [1/2], neither of whom are racing here. His non-monthly final Sunday Race Club results haven’t been that compelling, and I realize picking Teugels here over Ovett, Jones, and Lionel Vujasin is probably a bit of an upset pick, but hey this is all for fun so who cares if I’m wrong 😁

6) Freddy Ovett [9/4]

It’s difficult to rank Ovett. He’s dominated when he’s raced professionally on Zwift, but he really doesn’t do so that often. Indeed, we haven’t seen him in a pro race this year – or at all since he was crossing the finish line at the top of the Alpe last year as winner of the inaugural Zwift Games.

Ovett recently won a KISS Racing 100 community race (sitting at a silly 5.1 w/kg for the entirety of the 100 km), so his form seems pretty good. But it’s tough to say for sure. What I do know is that when Ovett races on Zwift, he tends to win. So I’ve got him high up in the rankings again this year.

7) Mika Söderström [5/21]

8) Merle Brunnee [9/23]

This is where it gets really tough. I’m grouping these two together, and don’t actually feel like there is much distance between Söderström and Brunnee and Jones and Kulchinsky below (or the riders I list as “notable omissions,” for that matter). But Söderström has looked strong in Zwift World Series, and currently sits in third behind Fuhrer and Kulchinsky after three stages. Brunnee, for her part, has been one of the only riders really able to challenge the trio of McCarthy, Guerra, and Fuhrer in Sunday Race Club, finishing on the podium in five of the six monthly finals so far this season. So I’ve got them here, but it’s close.

9) Ollie Jones [8/3]

Jones is a virtual racing trailblazer. Most folks introduce him as the first Zwift Academy male winner. But a cooler fun fact (okay, not actually), is that in Zwift Games he is likely to become the fifth rider ever – male or female – to eclipse 1,000 career PEC Points. He’s at 998 right now, so any top 10 finish will do it. And if he does, he would join Vujasin and Osborne on the men’s side, and Fuhrer and Cecilia Hansen on the women’s side, as the only riders to ever hit that milestone.

But Jones has been riding well this season. I expect him to be consistently in the top ten, and predict that will be good enough for a podium finish in the men’s Overall competition. This is essentially what he did through the first three stages of the Zwift World series, where his three top-10 finishes have placed him first in GC.

10) Kristen Kulchinsky [6/6]

Consistency. For a rider of her stature, Kulchinsky hasn’t actually won a lot of professional races. Only three to be exact (two Zwift Grand Prix stages and a Sunday Race Club finals). But she really doesn’t have bad days either. Do I think Kulchinsky will win a Zwift Games stage? To be honest, I don’t. Do I think she will be in the top 10 in each one, or close to it? Yeah, it feels inevitable. And consistency goes a long way in the Overall competition. Last year, she finished 8th, 5th, and 7th¹⁰ in the three stages, good for 6th overall. I expect something similar this year.

Notable Omissions

There are lots. It’s a deep field! Leaving all-time #1 and current #2 Lionel Vujasin off this list was hard. Same with Cecilia Hansen, the second best female virtual cyclist… ever. Other riders like Marlene Bjärehed [13/22], Lucy Charles-Barclay (she’s a triathlete who hasn’t raced much virtually, so our rankings don’t reflect her skill), Illi Gardner [18/15], Emma Belforth [27/28], Michał Kamiński [4/11], Martin Maertens [7/16], Daniel Turek [11/28], Mickael Plantureux [13/39], and Hayden Pucker [NR/150]¹¹ could also make me look like an idiot. The list goes on and on, though it’s mainly men since 7 of my top 10 are already women.

But I wanted to throw out a bunch of these names so that when one of them wins the darn thing, I can at least say I mentioned them in the preview 😂

Enjoy Zwift Games all – we will be here for you the whole way through!

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1. For Zwift Games, the top 30 riders in the first race (Watopia’s Loop de Loop; 24.9 km/289m) advanced to the second race. The top 10 riders in the second race (Watopia’s Jurassic Coast; 19.5 km/212m) then advanced to the final race. First across the line in the final race (Scotland’s Glasgow Crit Circuit; 15.3 km/166m) won the Sprint Championship.
2. From a community perspective, Zwift has five new routes for Zwift Games. Good stuff.
3. Another option is a flat, longer route with a bunch of intermediate points sprints so that the Sprint Championship is just a fury of constant sprinting every few kilometers. Just an idea.
4. Of course, the Climb Championship was the final stage last year, and so the race for the Overall Championship – as opposed to the Sprint Championship – as the women went up the Alpe was awesome. Kulchinsky stopping and waiting for her teammate Fuhrer is an all-time moment.
5. For a climbing stage!!!
6. Though obviously this has diminished with the rise of Sunday Race Club. The Epic course is basically an easy SRC route.
7. We have her ranked 12th all time on the virtual road, thanks mainly to her win at the inaugural UCI World Championship in 2020.
8. I should also note that current and all-time rankings of riders have shifted slightly since I published that post based on February Sunday Race Club finals results. Updated rankings are on our website.
9. I’ll probably publish something after the Zwift Games laughing at myself for how bad these predictions turn out. But I do want to make one thing clear ex-ante: I won’t punish myself if predictions turn out to be wrong because riders bow out. There’s so much more money in Sunday Race Club right now, and it’s completely plausible that a couple of these riders might skip a stage or drop out if they don’t do well in the sprint. Definitely don’t blame them for that – but it’s impossible to predict.
10. Though would’ve been higher in the Climb had she not stopped to wait for and help her teammate, Fuhrer, who was neck and neck with Guerra for the Overall championship.
11. But Pucker is the reigning U.S. champion, won the Echelon Racing League GC this year, and has looked dominant all season.