Zwift Games Leaderboards Deep Dive: Tips, GC Tricks, and the End of ZwiftPower?

March 5, 2025

LAST UPDATED March 5, 2025

The Zwift Games kicked off this week, and with it a new feature for 2025: web-based GC leaderboards!

See the Zwift Games leaderboards at zwift.com/zwift-games/races >

Let’s dive into how these leaderboards work, along with some tips for moving up the rankings and (of course) ideas for how future leaderboards could be improved.

Leaderboard Basics

It may be helpful to start by understanding that the Zwift Games leaderboards are simply showing your best finishing time for each of the 5 Zwift Games stages, and ranking it against other riders’ times.

The leaderboards do not take into account which category or timeslot you raced, whether you’ve got a heartrate monitor, whether you’re on ZwiftPower, how old you are, what team you’re on, whether you cheated and lowered your weight just before the event, how accurate your dual power recordings may be, etc.

Your Zwift Games dashboard shows which stages you’ve completed, and your global ranking (based on your best finishing time) in each stage:

Click one of the 5 “Stages” cards on the homepage and you’ll be taken to the leaderboard for that stage. Click one of the “Classification” tabs on top and you’ll be taken to those respective leaderboards:

Sprint combines stage 1 and 2
Climb combines stage 3 and 4
Epic is for stage 5
Overall combines all 5 stages

Whether you’re viewing a Classification or a Stage leaderboard, your filter options are the same. You can filter by any combination of Gender (view all or female only), Country, and Racing Score (in bands of 100 points):

Want more detail? Clicking a rider’s name or profile pic takes you to their main profile page, while clicking the stage time takes you to the results page for the particular event they raced.

Some Notes About Racing Scores Shown

There’s been a bit of confusion about the racing scores shown for each rider in these leaderboards. First, to be clear, the racing score shown is the rider’s score, apart from any seed score changes due to new power PRs, at the completion of the most recent race shown in the leaderboard. That means:

The score shown is not necessarily the rider’s current racing score. If a rider finished another scored race after the one shown, their score will probably be different than what’s shown.
If a rider raced the same stage multiple times, the leaderboard uses the rider’s fastest finishing time. The score resulting from that particular effort is what you’ll see on the leaderboard.
If you’re looking at a Classification leaderboard that uses two different stages, such as the Sprint Classification, the score shown will be the rider’s result from his fastest completion of the most recent stage. (So it only shows stage 1 in the Sprint Classification as of today, March 5, since nobody has raced stage 2 yet. But once riders have finished stage 2, the racing score shown will be from their best result on stage 2.)

One big gotcha here is that the score shown in the leaderboards does not show score increases due to new power PRs, since those are computed when your activity is saved, while the race result score is saved for the leaderboards as soon as you finish the race. So you may see riders with a result of (here’s a real example) 193, but an actual score after the event of 364 due to a big new power PR that bumped up their seed score. The race result is shown in the leaderboard, but if you click the time and see the racing score on the event results page, it will include any seed score increases.

The Racing Score filter in the leaderboards filters the results based on the rider’s racing score result for the races in question. It doesn’t look at which category (score band) the rider raced for the event. So if you filter based on a racing score of, say, 500-600, you may see riders who raced in any number of pen groupings. There are 16 different ways riders are grouped together for Zwift Games events, and riders are free to race any group at or above their current racing score:

Range 1: 0-159 | 160-269 | 270-389 | 390-509 | 510-649
Range 2: 0-209 | 210-329 | 330-449 | 450-569 | 570-699
Advanced Races: targeting 650+, but anyone can join
Women-Only Ranges: 0-199 | 200-299 | 300-399 | 400-499 | 500+

GC-Topping Tips

We’re only a couple of days into the Zwift Games, but riders are already starting to figure out what it will take to be a leader in the GC. It’s all about joining a fast group.

A simple illustration: if I filter Stage 1 results by Racing Score to show riders between 500-600 (my range), the top 10 all raced in an Advanced event which supposedly is for riders at 650+. (I didn’t click past the top 10, but my guess is most or all of the top-ranked riders did the same).

Topping a time-based GC that takes into account hourly events requires a primary focus on finding and hanging with the front of the fastest group. Whether you finish on the podium or not doesn’t really matter, unless you’re one of the very highest-ranked riders. What you need is a fast pack, so your overall course time is low.

My first stage 1 race (watch it here) was with the 450-570 group, and I turned in a time of 22:17 with a 3rd place finish. It basically felt like a tempo ride, with a hard effort in the final 2km. If I want a faster time, I need to join a faster group (say, 510-650, or a 650+ race) and suffer hard to hopefully hang with the front all the way to the finish. That’s how the current leaders in the 500-600 band with sub-20 minute times did it.

The fastest groups will be found in the Advanced races, and (assuming typical levels of rider cooperation) the larger those Advanced groups are, the faster they’ll be! Glancing at ZwiftPower results (which show rider counts, making research easy) the largest advanced groups are at these times:

10:15am UTC/5:15am ET/2:15am PT
5:15pm UTC/12:15pm ET/9:15am PT
6:15pm UTC/1:15pm ET/10:15am PT
7:15pm UTC/2:15pm ET/11:15am PT

Tuesday will probably see the highest race turnouts, but that remains to be seen, and the stages only last three days apiece.

Leaderboard Improvement Ideas

I love what Zwift is doing with these new leaderboards, but of course, it’s really just a first draft. How could they be improved? Here are a few simple upgrades.

My biggest wish would be for the leaderboards to indicate my rank when filters are applied. Currently, if I apply a filter (say, 500-600 Racing Score) to a leaderboard, I have no idea where I’m at, unless I scroll through the entire list, page after page, until I find my name. The filtered results should show my name at the top or bottom of every page, along with my filtered rank, sort of like Strava does with segment leaderboards.

It would also be helpful to have my leaderboard filters saved, so as I bounce between leaderboards, the same filters are always applied.

With multiple stages used for some of the classifications, a bit of explanatory text at the top of the Sprint and Climb classification leaderboards would be in order. Something like “The Sprint Classification is based on combined rider finishing times for Stage 1 (Makuri Madness) and Stage 2 (Scotland Smash).”

Lastly, I’d like to be able to save/send a URL of a particular filtered leaderboard. This would require passing the filters in the URL.

The End of ZwiftPower?

The Zwift racing community has been talking for years about how Zwift will probably move away from ZwiftPower as the source of final race results. But truth be told, we haven’t seen much movement, apart from Zwift beginning to show race results on event detail pages at zwift.com.

With that backdrop, it would seem that providing these Zwift Games leaderboards is a big step, removing ZwiftPower from the equation entirely, at least when it comes to Zwift Games results.

That said, Zwift has a long way to go before certain racers and race organizers can move away from ZwiftPower, so it’s unclear how or when that would ever happen. We need team functionality, the ability for race organizers to customize their events (including DQ criteria), series/league functionality for grouping races, global rider rankings, and much more.

So I don’t think ZwiftPower is going away anytime soon. For Zwift Games 2025, though, the final results live at Zwift.com… and that’s big news.