IN DEPTH: E- RACING
Cycl i n g is undergoing a quiet revolut ion, w ith the advent o f e- sports. Procycl i ng l ooks a t the growth of on line racing, w h ich at t ract s a huge number o f r iders and even has i t s own Wor lds
Future of the sport or glorified training platform? We look at the rise and rise of Zwift and e-sports
I’m not particularly good at it, but it is still racing. It doesn’t really matter, either, because there are 100 other people riding, as individuals, around me – a global peloton of faceless avatars. Their names are things like ‘J. Surname [TEAM VEGAN]’ and the race is called, rather plainly, Crit City Race. The parcours consists of laps around a virtual town, mostly flat with a short cobbled climb thrown in for good measure, a semblance of traditionalism. I’ve got two water bottles on a little folding table in the living room which sits right next to my bike. When my little 3D person wheels onto the cobbles, my smart trainer vibrates, and when I sprint to the line – 32nd, but that’s never the final score, you’ll have to go to another website for that later – there is no danger, no barriers or other people to crash into. I’m in the safety of my own home. It’s the only racing I know how to do – I started riding bikes seriously when the pandemic was underway after my in-laws gave me a Cervélo TT bike that’s 20 years old, and in its passé gunmetal grey paint job, I found a spark.
The race only lasts about 30 minutes, but it’s full-gas from the start. Like cyclocross, it begins with a bunch sprint, everyone trying to get in everyone else’s wheel, trying to make it into a select group at the front. There is no collaboration, no teamwork – it’s every rider for themselves, and you’d better believe every single tick in elevation is a proving ground. When gaps open up, they tend to remain open, for bridging each time is a massive effort. If you manage to snag a wheel, stay on it, or else. Physics is reduced to a bit of code, and there’s no wind to help or hinder. It’s short, brutal and merciless. This is e-racing.
If you want to ride your bike on the internet, there are half a dozen or so ways to do it, from training-based programmes like TrainerRoad to competitive and social platforms like Zwift and RGT Cycling, which are the two main arenas of e-racing. If you want to join a team, there are Facebook groups with thousands of members, and until recently, chaos reigned supreme. However, starting around 2018, things began to professionalise, a process that sped up considerably during the pandemic, when everyone, including the professionals, was forced into lockdown. There was suddenly a swath of virtual classics, a virtual Tour de France, all broadcast on various streaming platforms just like an irl (real life) race would be. 2020 saw the inauguration of the UCI E-Sports World Championships, which added further legitimacy to riding online. However, despite this, e-racing still manages to feel underground, unmanaged, like the Wild Wild West.
Just like in irl cycling, there are teams, sponsorships, racing leagues at various levels and regulations, aka anti-cheating measures. To briefly explain, anyone can ride on Zwift, which separates riders into four categories based on their watts-perkilogramme for races which happen at all times of the day, some of which are restricted by category or by gender and many require a heart rate monitor as an anti-cheating measure. The official results of these races are not those posted on Zwift but rather on ZwiftPower, a thirdparty website that filters the results, eliminating people who are riding outside their category or using unapproved tools like ZPower. It’s kind of messy how things escalate from there.
The premier league in Zwift is called the Zwift Racing League or ZRL, and teams have to apply to gain access to this league. However, this doesn’t mean that all of the teams are pro teams – in fact, a lot of amateur and online-only teams manage to gain access as well. ‘Pro’ teams in the online racing sphere are rather nebulous – there isn’t a governing body in Zwift or RGT that sets categories analogous to, say, WorldTour vs Continental, and, like the wild wild west, most of the ZRL is unregulated, meaning there isn’t a testing pool in the same way there is in real-life road cycling – Zwift instead scans for discrepancies in riders’ power data and the data they’ve reported to the app with regards to their weight and height, both of which change the physics of the rider’s avatar and their watts-per-kilo figure. Still, there are teams like Saris+The Pro’s Closet and Canyon E-Sports that offer top riders sponsorships, and even the pro teams are getting in on the action. Alpecin-Fenix and Canyon-Sram have both offered professional contracts to the winners of Zwift’s Zwift Academy programme, and Movistar announced a fully-funded e-racing team this past March. Meanwhile, on RGT (which is less socially-oriented), there was the Echelon Racing Series, supported by USA Cycling, which had a ‘pro’ league comprising top riders from competitive amateur teams, receiving full coverage on both YouTube and VeloNews.
It’s best to think of platforms like RGT or Zwift as race organisers similar to ASO and series like ZRL as being similar to, say, Flanders Classics. Different races in different places require different strategies and talents from riders and this is also the case with different platforms with different riding physics. With governing bodies like USA Cycling and the UCI getting involved - imposing strict regulatory measures for its World Championships, including drug testing, sending every competitor the exact same model of trainer (a Tacx Neo NT2) and a complicated series of weigh-in videos - it’s clear that the powers that be in cycling are taking this seriously, and it’s no wonder. Seeing as there are hundreds of thousands of people Zwifting at any given time, that’s a lot of eyeballs for sponsors.
Despite the chaotic state of its current iteration, e-racing has a lot of potential and a lot of positives. SD Worx rider Ashleigh Moolman Pasio, winner of the inaugural UCI E-Sports World Championships, spoke extensively to me about the role of e-racing in lowering the cost of entry into competitive cycling and leveling the playing field for women’s cycling in particular. Moolman Pasio, who entered cycling later in life than the average professional after graduating from university with a degree in chemical
engineering, likes the fact that that e-sports bring in people from all walks of life. She’s currently working on starting an e-sports team of her own, through the cycling tourism business she runs in Girona, Rocacorba Cycling
“Seeing all the different types of women on this WhatsApp group, from youngsters who are just starting out and trying to get to the top, to full-time working women who never imagined racing their bikes... For people like that, [e-racing is] way less intimidating than the crews, tactics and skills, and riding in a bunch,” she said.
When Moolman Pasio used to do ‘ride with a pro’ events before the pandemic, she was frustrated by how few women showed up compared to men. After hosting women-only social rides on Zwift, she realised that the sport’s intimidating nature kept people out. “When they’re riding in the virtual world, they feel safer because they’re in their own home,” she said. “One woman said it perfectly; she told me, ‘My avatar has no shame.’ So, all of a sudden, they were way more open to asking questions, to trying new things because no one can actually see them. That’s when I realised how important this was going to be for growing the sport,”
The equipment plays a role, too. To ride competitively in real life, the cost of entry is prohibitive – a really good racing bike runs around 6,000 euros, but a smart trainer that can be used with any bike ranges from 600 to 1,200. In addition, on Zwift, UCI rules about things like minimum bike weight, a number that is based on the mass of the male body, are no longer relevant.
The universality of online is another perk. For riders based in places a long way from Europe, like Tibco-SVB’s Sarah Gigante, e-sports allow for more racing during more times of the year. “I can race the best Zwift races from across the world from the comfort of my lounge room, which makes a huge difference for Australians in particular,” Gigante said.
Zwift is the closest normal people like me will get to riding with and against the pros. I get a notification every time Mathieu van der Poel is online, and, should I choose, I could hop on my bike and try to stay in his wheel for a few seconds if I wanted to. Even though that’s nothing like being in his presence after a race, it’s still something, a point of access, and that’s very appealing. Hence why teams like Trek-Segafredo will occasionally do Zwift social rides with their riders, where they answer questions while pedalling at a leisurely pace that anyone can follow. Building these relationships between teams and fans is important for growing the sport, just like other social media is in terms of brand recognition and audience engagement.
Moolman Pasio, who is 35, told me that e-sports have specifically given her a career to look forward to once she retires from the road. Meanwhile, some of the best e-sports racers aren’t even professional cyclists or pro athletes at all. Saris+The Pro’s Closet e-racer and winner of the overall Echelon Racing Series Jacquie Godbe is an MD/PhD student at Northwestern University in Chicago. She started e-racing during the pandemic as a means to recover from a running injury and because the gyms that allowed her to train for her sport of choice, triathlon, were closed.
“I’ll fully admit that e-racing started as a substitute for what I couldn’t do,” Godbe said in an email. “However, as I learned more about the platform and got to explore more and more opportunities within the sport, it rapidly developed into a passion. As far as identifying as an e-sports specialist? I guess at this point I have to!” Godbe now has a dedicated training programme through her coach devoted entirely to e-racing.
One thing is clear, however. E-racing is becoming its own animal, distinct and nuanced in its own way. We saw in the UCI World E-Sports Championships how riders like Anna van der Breggen failed to bridge the gap between road racing and e-racing. Because it was in December, many pros were off their peak or didn’t train specifically, choosing instead to simply wing it. That was a mistake. Moolman Pasio is from South Africa and is routinely outnumbered by riders from stronger cycling nations in the Worlds road race. However, she saw e-Worlds as an alternative path to the rainbow bands, and she trained for the online event explicitly, reconning the course in practice, tracking the Zwift data of her competitors and planning her in-game power-ups (which are given to the riders after they complete a lap or a king of the mountain and include either a feather which reduces the weight of the rider in-game or an aero-helmet to give them an aerodynamic boost, an element totally foreign to all other kinds of racing). Godbe, who finished fifth, sat down with her coach and oriented her training around being as explosive as possible on the final hill. As an e-sports specialist, she focused also on the in-game mechanics, the drafting and downhill mechanisms that play a big role in team and individual strategy. Gigante, who was already in training for the Australian National Championships, found it easy to add Zwift
I get a notification every time Mathieu van der Poel is online, and I could hop on my bike and try to stay in his wheel for a few seconds if I wanted
Worlds to her existing schedule, as Australian racing often happens earlier than the traditional road calendar. She came second.
So what’s next for e-sports? For years, Zwift founder Eric Min has targeted the 2024 Summer Olympics, wanting e-racing to be among the sports there. As the discipline continues to professionalise, it’s likely that more and more pro teams and their sponsors will get involved, either in forming teams of their own or in using e-racing as a recruitment tool for the road. Still, schedule-wise, the e-racing world caters to the big guns on the road. The E-Sports World Championship takes place in December during most riders’ offseasons, and both the Echelon series and ZRL run during the winter, focusing most heavily on the slower months of December through February, which would benefit riders from places in the southern hemisphere whose road racing seasons run opposite to those in Europe, as well as those riding cyclo-cross in the autumn and early winter. This is a double-edged sword for many of the pros, who do not want to risk peaking too early, which, in a way, evens the playing field for those emerging as e-sports specialists.
As it stands now, Zwift is a massive platform, and while regulation continues to be a problem, the standards set by the UCI for the first World Championships prove that, at least at the top end, anticheating measures are possible to achieve. We may see e-racing take on some of the glamour of professional gaming, where tournaments are held live in stadiums and broadcast on channels like ESPN with full commentary, something that could sell a lot of tickets. Given that gate money, or lack thereof, has been cited as one of the most challenging aspects of building a sustainable business model for the sport, this will attract a lot of attention from the sport’s stakeholders.
The future of e-sports is bright, especially as its own discipline within cycling. It is unique in tactics and skills and favours a wider variety of bodies from all kinds of different backgrounds than road cycling, which is still very European and whose stars get younger and younger every year. Either way, one thing is certain: your trainer-bound bike might not be going places, but e-racing certainly is.