In the last blog post I tried to show that the majority of races in Zwift and on ZwiftPower seem to be won by riders making a smaller effort than riders coming in behind. As you may have had objections to the methodology, I made new little study which I think you will find more methodologically sound.

Method

I went through all races in cat C starting from the strike of midnight between the 16th and the 17th of Aug 2020, working myself backwards until I had had a look at 100 eligible races. Again, a lot of races had to be discarded due to low attendance or due to a missing link on ZP to the Zwift rider profile page for the race in question.

This time I chose to look at the winner in comparison to the no 4 guy, the guy who didn’t quite make it to the podium. Did any of these riders, winners vs 1st losers, on average, seem to make less of an effort than the others? Effort here is defined as a higher workload in terms of HR distribution over the race. A rider who spends more time in higher HR zones than another rider is considered to have worked harder, made a higer effort.

What is to be expected here? Either we could argue that, all else equal, the winners would make more of an effort on average. If two physically equal riders compete (and they will be equal, on average, with large numbers), then the rider who makes the highest effort would win. 

Or we could argue that there should be no difference. Chance, tactics, random occurences, interference by other riders, and powerups may be what decides a race among equals. Everybody should be working roughly equally hard, at least at the top end of the race.

Either of the two scenarios above, or both, is to be considered the baseline, or the null hypothesis, as a scientist would say. If the actual results deviate from this, then it indicates that the null hypothesis isn’t true and that something strange is going on. 

What we don’t expect to see here is for the winner to make less effort than the no 4 guy, because that doesn’t make sense. Or, as I would like to argue, it indicates the presence of cruising, i.e. that some riders stay behind in a category, even though they would meet the requirements of a higher category, just to be able to keep winning. By staying within W/kg limits during races they have an advantage over riders who can only reach W/kg limits by giving it their all. The advantage lies in being able to drop people by having reserves and by not riding at VO2Max.

Anyway, I checked the HR distribution graphs of the winner and the no 4 rider in 100 races in cat C and made notes in a table. If the winner made less effort than the no 4, then the race got a ‘1’ in one column, the ‘Oh shit!’ column. If instead the no 4 rider made less effort than the winner OR if there was no clear difference between the respective HR chart, then the race got a ‘1’ in another column, the ‘As expected…’ column.

Results in Cat C

Out of 100 random, consecutive races in cat C, 61 ended up in the ‘Oh shit!’ column, i.e. the winner made less effort than the no 4 guy. Only 39 races showed a no 4 working harder than the winner or no difference between the two of them.

A Comparison

Before we come to any discussion of the results, a comparison with cat A was needed. If there is indeed cruising going on in cat C, then the same should not be true of cat A. Why? Because the hypothesis is that it is the upper performance limit of the categories B-D that creates the incentive to cruise, whereas in cat A there is no upper limit to performance. The harder you go, the better your chances of winning. There is no downside to going too hard as you don’t risk getting a DQ or an upgrade (unless you present superhuman Watts of course).

Scrounging up races in cat A proved to be significantly harder. Not only are there fewer cat A riders, although they are arguably more active on Zwift than the C guys. And in both the cat C study and the cat A study there had to be at least 4 valid participants (according to ZP) in order to do the comparison between the winner and the no 4 guy of course. So a lot of races had to be discarded for this very reason. 

Secondly, it is far more common among cat A riders to do a spindown or even to keep riding hard after a race as a prolongation of the race as a training session. And while finish times are not affected if you keep riding after the finish line, your HR distribution graph on Zwift.com is. This made comparisons difficult quite often and led to more discarding of races.

Results in Cat A

During the same time period of the 100 races in cat C, only 52 eligible cat A races were found. Of those only 25 races had a winner making less of an effort than the no 4 guy. 27 races showed no difference or a harder working no 4.

We should keep in mind here that there is actually some room for completely legit cruising in A. I have made no distinction between A and A+. Quite often a race is won by an A+ rider who doesn’t have to go flat out to win. Not only do you not go any harder than you can, you also go no harder than needed – if you are already in the lead, then there is no need to push. Still, over half of the races in cat A showed no such difference.

Conclusions

To me this is yet another piece of evidence showing the presence of cruising in Zwift – whether the cruisers are aware of it or not. And it does seem counter-intuitive that you should be at an advantage making less effort than other contenders. This happens because of the upper performance limit in cat B-D. 

You are not allowed to go too hard in cat B-D. It is not forbidden to be too strong though. So as long as you are too strong for your category but manage your performance as to stay within cat limits, then you are a favorite in the race. You don’t always win, but you will win more than your fair share, and you can keep winning indefinitely. ZwiftPower will not upgrade you.

This does not sit well with a sport in my opinion. We should move to a results-based category system, like in real-life sports. Be as strong as you can. Race as hard as you like. Win any race where you are the strongest. But if you keep getting great results in your category time and again over a season, then it’s time for you to get an upgrade. But not because you went too hard but because you did too well too often. 

Thus a sandbagger, going well over the current cat limits, will win legitimately but will get an upgrade soon enough into a category where he is no longer that superior and dominant, and you won’t have to face him anymore. And thus a cruiser can still cruise if he likes, i.e. he can still choose to not go too hard in a race, but he can no longer make less effort than you and still win over and over. If he does go for wins, then he will be upgraded, just like the sandbagger, and he will no longer suck your wheel in your races.

A Zwift with results-based categories is a healthier Zwift. And a more fun Zwift. Fun is Fast. And Fun is Fair!

Footnote

So there was a difference between cat C and cat A but was it just random or what is large enough to be statistically significant, i.e. so large that it is unlikely that it was caused by chance? 

We only had 52 races in cat A. Comparing the first 52 races in cat C with the entire sample of cat A with the Mann-Witney U-test, we get a p-value of 0.088. So it’s not statistically significant at a 5% confidence level (although at the 10% level). I will come back with a larger sample, e.g. 100 races in each category, as I am convinced that the difference will stand and will then be statistically significant.

Tagged : Cheating Theory

As a follow-up to the last couple of posts about cruising and the weird effort limits the W/kg category system imposes on us, I decided to do a little pseudo-scientific study of the racing in Zwift.

Previously I have claimed that the W/kg system favors making less effort than competitors in a race, if the objective is to win. If you haven’t read the last couple of posts (you should read all of them), then you might ask yourself, how does that make sense? That couldn’t possibly be right, could it? All else equal, sports are won by people making more effort than their competitors, isn’t that so?

And the awful truth is that, yes, in all sports except Zwift this is indeed so. But Zwift is different, I have claimed, since it has a uniquely weird categorization that imposes an upper limit to your power output in categories B-D – regardless of your perceived effort, I might add. This would then mean, if I am right, that ideally, if you are set on winning races in Zwift, you would race in a category you are too strong for but still make sure to stay within the category’s upper W/kg limits. You would then not get disqualified by ZwiftPower but still be able to beat competitors in climbs, sprints, surges, what have you. In other words, you would likely win. (Unless you are up against several other guys like you, i.e. several other cruisers, whether they cruise the race intentionally or not.) And not only would you likely win, you could also repeat this indefinitely. You would keep winning over and over and still be allowed to stay in your category.

So let’s put these claims to the test. I took a random day (today, Sun Aug 17) and went through all the races from midnight to midnight to see if winners did indeed make less effort than the others.

The idea here is that the occurence of a winner making less of an effort compared to others becomes apparent by studying HR distribution graphs on the Zwift website. If e.g. someone wins a race spending most of it in HR Zone 3, yellow, and does so against a runner-up who spent most of the race in Zone 4, orange, and both are at or close to the W/kg limits of the category, then that indicates that the winner could go harder still, just like the runner-up. Only going harder might push the winner above limits and result in a DQ or even a category upgrade. So the winner wins by being the strongest and by making less effort.

Method

I went through over 80 races in those 24 hours and studied cat B. (We all feel we know cheating is abundant in cat D, right, so what about B?) Of those 80 races about half of them had to be discarded. I set a lower limit of at least 5 eligible participants in cat B (according to ZP) because I wanted to make sure there had been at least some kind of dynamics during the race. The far most common reason for a race to get discarded was indeed lack of participants. But there were also some age category races and some others special cases that did not lend themselves to a comparison between cat B riders.

For a race to qualify as having been won by someone making less effort than others I looked excludingly at the podium, even though I have claimed before that cruisers are over-represented not just among winners but the entire podium. This is because there are often more cruisers than one in a race, I have claimed. So we should actually look beyond the podium, but I had to simplify a bit.

So, anyway, the heuristics here was that if the winner made significantly less effort than either of the no 2 or no 3 guy, then the race would qualify as having been won through less effort. 

Doesn’t it distort things comparing one guy to two? Wouldn’t on average at least one other guy have made more effort than the winner just by random chance? Well, is that your experience from other sports in the categories below the top one? Also, you need to consider how the comparison was made. To qualify as less effort, it had to be significantly, visibly so. I looked at in what zone(s) most of the time in race was spent and if there was an obvious difference compared to the rest of the podium. 

It is, after all, rather conspicuous and intriguing if the winner sits mainly in Zone 3 if the no 3 guy races on the threshold, don’t you think? How would you explain that? All on the podium are at the top of the category but the winner is not the one having a near-death experience? (Keep in mind the upper W/kg limit here, which does not exist in other sports where categories are based on past results rather than, weirdly enough, past power outputs.) I would then say it clearly supports my claims.

It should be added that in cases where a rider did not use a HR monitor, I have counted that as less effort per default, regardless of whether it was the winner or any of the other two. So in one case there is a race where the winner, although he did seem to slouch around in Zone 3 mainly, was up against two others with no HR monitors and thus that particular race was not deemed as having been won by someone making less effort.

Results

Of 43 eligible races in cat B on this date, 30 were won by someone making less effort than either or both of the no 2 and no 3. In 13 races the difference in effort was not significant or the winner made more of an effort than the others.

Conclusions

If you want to win a Zwift race on ZwiftPower, the odds speak strongly in favor of making less effort than others in the front group. Don’t push yourself too hard! Relax. Cruise. And you will likely win.

Tagged : Cheating Theory

The other day I posted a reply to a thread on the Zwift forum. If you didn’t get the point of the previous blog post, the one about Ethics in Zwift, then maybe my reply can serve as a clarification. So I thought I would repost it here.

As usual, I don’t want to expose names. (Dig yourself if you must.) Names are not interesting, at all. Nothing of the problems with Zwift racing that I write about has anything to do with individual subscribers anyway. Rather, I cover a system that is falling apart because it was flawed to begin with. And it is this system that creates cheating by promoting it. And if this system creates a whole bunch of cheaters, it also creates ten times as many weird and unfair situations in races on a daily basis even though it can’t be classified as cheating.

Anyway, a guy in cat B despairs after a race and decides to seek advice from the forum. And I would guess this isn’t the first time he despairs. Nor the last. It was probably just the average race and thus a representative one. Our rider is on top of cat B in terms of his sustainable W/kg, but he is light and weighs in at only 67 kg. 

Now, the problem was that even though our rider put out an impressive average effort of 4.1 W/kg over the race, barely admissible by ZP standards, he still came in outside the top 10. On ZP. And so he asks the forum, what’s wrong with his race tactics? 

Many of us can sympathize with that because we have been in exactly the same situation. You fight your way up to what you think should be the top of your category only to find that you’re not there still. And after a while you begin to suspect that you never will be, and that you will sooner get moved to the next category than get a podium placing (the light rider’s curse). And you know what? You’re right. You’re are screwed. You were screwed even before you started racing in Zwift, and you only realized it now.

With that backdrop, here was my reply:

I’m not racing in B but then again B, C and D are all the same, while A is an entirely different beast. I think responder X leaves an important clue above here.

Like he says, most of those above you in the results list have at least a sliver of green in their NP bar, meaning they have higher variability in their power output than you. Like you say, meaning they can. Whereas you – I’m guessing here – are more in an all-out effort and not able to match them in e.g. small climbs since, like you say, you have little to spare. They on the other hand…

Plus you are already at a disadvantage being on the lighter side among the top X, since you need to push higher W/kg to stick with the heavies on flattish roads. And being light alone doesn’t benefit you as much as one might think even in a climb.

The next thing you should look at now is the other riders’ race profiles on the Zwift website, quickly accessed through the little green bar diagram symbols on the far left on the ZP race report. (ZP is down right now or I’d look myself.)

Take a look at their HR distribution diagrams. Are they different from yours? Do they have more time spent in Zone 3 or lower Zone 4 than you? If so, then there is your explanation to the disappointing result. If they are not working as hard as you, no wonder they have juice to spare at critical moments. And so you get dropped.

I point out two important things above:

1. At some point you as a lighter rider will have to go over W/kg cat limits to stay with a heavier guy who is onthe limit. (Sums up the entire race, doesn’t it?) So as a lighter rider you are basically already screwed. You can’t really both win and stay in cat (unless you race in A). The race favors a heavier rider, given equal W/kg capabilities. Any race does, except the rare race including a very long climb. Granted, at some point weight turns into overweight and body fat doesn’t help you race. But there is a sweetspot in cat B-D. And whatever it is (it’s dependent on other race participants’ weights), it’s higher than your 67 kg for sure since your weight is below the race average. Is this cycling physics? No, it’s Zwift race rules and just that. See below.

2. Given that you both respect W/kg cat limits but barely so, you will always be at a disadvantage against someone who is making less effort than you. Yes, that’s correct! Zwift actually favors cruising a race.

Sandbagging is not the most common form of cheating in Zwift. Cruising is. It’s just not as visible, unless you start digging in data on Zwift and ZP. How to win a race in cat B-D in Zwift and ZP is you get fitter so as to outgrow your cat but still stick around. You never pull, always draft. You always monitor your avg. W/kg as to not go over limits although you could. You leave a little room to spare in that average. And then in climbs or similar you bring down the hammer briefly. If you don’t do this, then someone else will. In basically any and every race. You need to get really lucky to sign up to a race with no cruisers in it.

Cruising as a form of cheating is real. Then on top of that there is a huge grey area where people aren’t exactly (or consciously) cheating but their levels of effort still differ significantly in a race. And who is to say how much you are supposed to suffer in a race? Shouldn’t you be allowed to race any way you like, it’s your body after all? And the answer is yes of course. But then also, should someone who doesn’t want to go too hard have the upper hand in a race? I don’t know. Occasionally maybe? But in every race?! Because that is what we have, a race system that will always favor riders who don’t want to go too hard. Zwift Velominati rule #1: STFU – Soften The F… Up, kinda.

It all boils down to the W/kg system in Zwift, as promoted by ZP, being utterly inappropriate as a race categorization. And there is nothing like it in any RL sport. It is unique and uniquely inappropriate. We can never get away from Watts and kg because both are needed for accurate and fair simulations on a smart trainer in cat A. But they won’t do as a way to split up riders into categories to make racing interesting for all.
What is needed is instead a race categorization based on past results, just like in US cycling, World Cup skiing etc etc, a proven concept. It works. And it would work for Zwift too and make racing more intuitive and interesting.

You enter a race and don’t feel like going too hard, you just wanted to participate for fun and fitness. Ok fine, but you don’t win. Agreed? Fair deal?

You enter another race and don’t feel like going too hard (except at crucial moments like small climbs) and it turns out you still outperform the other riders because they are weaker even though they go flat out. Ok fine, you win this time. Kudos to you for being so strong!

You enter yet another race and don’t feel like going too hard, and it turns out you still outperform the other riders. Not fine. Because now you have already been on the podium in many races in your category and it’s time you get moved up to the next category where you obviously and rightfully belong. And a results-based categorization does exactly that. It’s self-sanitizing.

You can’t put upper limits on people’s efforts in a single competition or race. (You have to do that between races.) “Go hard! But not too hard!” That goes against reason and the nature of sports. Time for a change.

At the time ZP was down. Since then I have had the opportunity to have a look at the HR distribution graphs of the riders in that race. Our rider looks like this:

Our rider’s graph looks a little odd in that so much time is spent in Zone 5. It turns out he has a max HR that goes at least 10 bpm higher than the average for his age. And so without adjusting HR zones, what looks like a Zone 5 effort is rather an upper Zone 4. But even so, as I suspected he is on the threshold most of the race. For a few seconds here and there he gets to coast a bit, but you know what it’s like doing 30/15’s. Those 15 seconds are not enough to bring your HR down. And thus we see less variability at the upper end. He can push it a little when he is forced to but not by much. There is little to spare.

Some of the guys higher up in the placings are working hard too but there are also some guys like this:

He finishes the race a few seconds ahead of our rider. With his higher variability of power output he probably sprinted the crap out of our rider and a few others. But how do you beat a guy like this one? You can’t! He will still have a whole pocket full of matches as you strike your last one.

These two riders are competing in the same category with the same artificial upper effort limit. They are not allowed to go any harder than 4.0 (+0.1) W/kg according to ZP. Who would you rather be hitting 4.0 if the task is to win the race? (That’s usually what races are about.)

This is not to say that a rider like ours above wouldn’t look the same if he was somewhere in the middle of a category in a proper and sound results-based race categorizaation. He would. And he still wouldn’t win. The difference, though, is that the fights for the podium in any such category would be hard, fair and equal for anyone except for those just passing through the category. Let them pass through. And let the real racing begin.

I say it again: 

You cannot put an upper limit to rider effort in a race.

It’s a nobrainer, it really is. Stop hugging an idiotic system just because it feels familiar to you. Once upon a time you were a neophyte zwifter and everything was new and unfamiliar. It’s time to go out in deep waters again. Knee-deep. I know, it’s scary. But you will be fine, I promise.

Tagged : Cheating Theory

If you think about sports and games and their rule sets, you can always discern some sort of ethics and ideals in them. 

Take chess for example. There is nothing random about chess, except maybe picking sides. In theory, you could foresee just about everything in a chess game, as permutations or possibilities, and thus you have a fair chance to avoid disasters and to push your opponent into a disadvantageous position. The side who wins has done the calculating ahead better, and this is also the ethics of the game. The player who is the best at calculating and visualizing position deserves to win. If they didn’t deserve to win, then there would be some handicap rule that would kick in once a player becomes too dominant on the board. No, no holds barred. The smartest guy deserves to win, every time.

In football (either kind), the team that scores the most goals wins. They deserve to win because they scored the most goals. It makes them better, more ideal. Scoring more goals than the opponent is going to take both individual and team skill and efforts. The winning team was better at those skills and in those efforts, we say, and so they deserved to win. Sometimes, if it’s not our favorite team winning, we say that the opponents were just lucky or that they played unfairly or we blame it all on the referee. But all else equal, we’d say that the team that scored the most goals wins according to the rules and that they also deserved to win. The rules are aligned with our sense of ethics.

In cycling, real-life cycling, the rider who crosses the finish line first deserves to win, unless he doped or raced unfairly or dangerously. Why? Well… he was the fastest and umm… fast is good, isn’t it? Why was he the fastest? Because he was better? Better in what way? Well, he was either more talented or fitter, or he worked harder than the opponents. So talented and fit is good? Yes, that is good. The ideal rider is talented and fit. What about working hard then? Yes, that is also good. The ideal rider works hard in a race. If he is up against an equally talented and fit opponent, then he will win if he works harder and that is an ideal rider, one willing to dig deeper than the others regardless of the pain and misery it puts him in. And getting fit takes a lot of pain and misery to begin with, so someone did their homework. OK…

Talent is needed at the top level but talent alone won’t usually win a race, because a rider might be up against an equal talent, and then it all comes down to, all else equal, who dug the deepest. And we like that. We admire that. When people go through a lot of suffering without giving up to achieve a goal. A person like that deserves to win, we think.

Now, look at Zwift racing. What is the ethics there. We bring our tarmac values to the OLED screen, but if we consider the rule set of Zwift racing, what it actually implies, we arrive at different ideals, ones that conflict with out tarmac values.

There isn’t one single rule set in Zwift racing. There are at least two broad main versions and then some subsets that the organizer can choose between. We have the Zwift Proper rules and then the ZwiftPower rules, and they are not quite the same. 

The Zwift Proper rules say that the fastest rider deserves to win, period. They do not make any assumptions whatsoever about the rider and why he was the fastest, regardless of category. The Beta Crit City races are a little different and approach the ZwiftPower ethics, but they are experimental and a separate case.

The ZwiftPower rules for cat A is similar to Zwift Proper rules, but the rules set for cat B-D says that the fastest rider deserves to win too, but it does make some assumptions about the rider and stipulate some preconditions. More specifically, they say that the fastest rider up to a certain point deserves to win. You can’t be too fast. Sometimes you also can’t go too hard. Then you don’t deserve to win. You have to nail it just right, depending on your capabilities but in a way also regardless of your capabilities. 

The rider that pinpoints this ideal speed the best, which translates into pinpointing ideal estimates of physical dimensions (matching Watt, weight and height in some ideal combination, and add draft and powerups to that) is also the ideal rider, the one we should admire. 

The ZwiftPower rules do not, however, make any assumptions about subjective effort. If a rider barely wins the sprint in a race after digging horribly deep, but not so deep as to go over cat limits, whereas the runner-up cruised his way through the race, also respecting cat limits, then the winner deserves to win, but not because he worked harder than the other rider. He deserves to win because he optimized certain physical estimates slightly better, thus getting closer to the category ideal than the runner-up. Correspondingly, if the cruiser had won the sprint, then he would be the deserving winner.

So the winner was the smartest and therefore deserved to win, like the winner in chess who calculated the whole game better than the opponent? No, the rules don’t put a value on smarts. This optimizing of physics estimates could have happened for any reason – careful calculation or just dumb luck going flat out – it doesn’t matter. It’s not why you got it just right that makes you admirable and deserving, it’s simply that you did.

This is Zwift racing ethics, like it or not. It’s a quirky sport, isn’t it? 

As a side note, did you for one second think that someone sat at a drawing board and thought it all up just like this, the way it became? 

“Hey, I know, I’m going to design this cool new sport which is about making guesstimates about physical estimates like, you know, when you have to guess how many marbles are in a jar at a market, only you have to put the marbles in there yourself and they’re heavy-like and umm…”

If you, like me, don’t think that Zwift racing, as it turned out to be, was ever truly planned, then ask yourself this: Why exactly do you keep hugging the W/kg system? Why exactly would it be better than a results-based system that promotes doing your best rather than hitting a target W/kg? Is it, perhaps, just because you’re a hopeless conservative conformist in general, one who dislikes change just because change makes you feel uneasy, and who wouldn’t know ‘improvement’ even if it hit you in the face?

Tagged : Cheating Theory

Think about W/kg categories for a second. It’s the bane of fair Zwift racing. We have talked at length about that already. But let’s think in broader terms. What could W/kg possibly be good for at all? How did Zwift come up with these categories to begin with? Let’s do some guess work.

Zwift gives us an understanding of our own personal physiology that surpasses even that of the most expensive sports watches. It’s all these numbers and zones and whatnot. Confusing at first but they tell us how we work on a bike and given some time we start to get it. What we can and cannot do, what we might be able to improve, how to approach certain types of efforts and challenges.

At the center of all this sports science is our functional threshold, arguably the most important of all the numbers. We arrive at our functional threshold power through an FTP test or ramp test in Zwift or sometimes by just going hard yet somewhat consistent in a race.

What do we need the FTP or the W/kg for? It will tell us our max sustainable effort for an hour of work on the bike, which incidentally happens to be a very common time span in the activities on offer in Zwift on a daily basis and for good reason. It will also help us pick a suitable group ride in Zwift. 

Often the organizers of group rides will be quite specific. Such and such a ride will aim for an average of, say, 1.8-2.0 W/kg, given the ride leaders weight of so and so many kg. And then, since you know your FTP and your W/kg, you can quite easily decide if the ride is for you or not. You will have at least a rough idea of how the ride will feel in your body, whether you can cope and whether the ride fits into your training regimen if you have one.

These things were at the core of Zwift early on. This was likely what Zwift had in mind when introducing the categories. Racing was underdeveloped but caught on more and more as time went by because… well, racing is fun! The community wanted it, more than Zwift could foresee. And Zwift provided the means to race but did not meddle too much with how races were organized. They left that to the community. ZwiftPower did the meddling instead.

Have you ever participated in a Zwift race with non-standard race categories? One common example would be masters/veteran races with age interval categories. The organizer uses the A-D categories for convenience but the meaning of those categories is not the standard W/kg one. And the Zwift race mechanics are crude and flexible enough to let you do that. It works just fine. You could organize a race where cat A was male riders on US virtual bikes and cat D female riders on European bikes. Or rider length-based categories. It’s up to your imagination, more or less. At least there are no technical limits to what you can write in your race presentation about what the categories are supposed to mean.

In other words, ZwiftPower could have worked for any type of race category system. They were never tied to W/kg. And, in fact, an embryo of something different can be found on the far right of the ZwiftPower race reports or rider profiles, a kind of rank score that could have been developed further into a results-based categorization.

Moving towards a results-based race category system would have required ZwiftPower to get the clubs and other race organizers onboard. Not necessarily an easy thing. But it would have been possible. And then we wouldn’t have ended up in the W/kg mess we are in right now. 

ZwiftPower is as much a culprit as Zwift, I dare say even more so, when it comes to unintentionally promoting the far most common forms of cheating in Zwift – sandbagging and cruising. Then they set out to chase down the cheaters they have created themselves by building racing on an unsound foundation, through ever more complicated means of catching sandbaggers. Even Zwift have started to help out with that lately. But the cruisers are untouched so far. You can cruise all you want. And I argue you should. 

This is all so backwards if you think about it. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, they say. And Zwift racing went straight to hell, I say, as an addendum to that. You cannot have an influential third party working against reason in a platform of yours. ZwiftPower must go. Well played, Zwift, and I mean it. This is potentially a new beginning. Not a day too soon.

This sounds very harsh, I know. But we just have to kill a few darlings now. The subscribers will benefit in the long run.

Tagged : Cheating Theory

I concluded in the previous post, on cruising in the Virtual Tour de France, that Zwift races are necessarily brutal in their very nature.

That said, the men’s stage 5 up the Ven-Top route, the virtual Mont Ventoux, was indeed brutal. Perhaps a little too brutal… 

I am not saying that there necessarily had to be something fishy about the front trio, but those W/kg numbers they produced were very high. 

The break-way effort that lasted all the way to the finish line for all three of them (althought they got separated amongst themselves towards the end) didn’t last a full hour. Let’s keep that in mind. 

Rather, the attack came 18 min into the race and they got to the finish line in about 45 min. That’s a 27 min breakaway. Roughly. At least it went on for more than 20 min. Let’s keep that in mind too. 

And the pace of the break-away trio never settled to match that of the chasing peloton since the three of them were duking it out amongst themselves all the way to the finish. Let’s also note here that a large part of the break-away was spent pushing pedals at 7+ W/kg. Impressive!

Now over to something completely different. I don’t know if you have thought about this, especially now with the Olympics being postponed, but aren’t the track and fields world records coming in more rarely these days? How come?

Sports science and medicine have an explanation. Top athletes in sports that have you push Watts, whether cycling or running or skiing, and whether sprinting or going long distances, are close or even at the physiological limits of the human body. That’s the official explanation. Hence we are not to expect the 100m dash world record to be beaten easily, and if it is, then it won’t be by much.

I’m sure you have seen a power curve. If you haven’t, then here is one I st0led from the interwebz:

It’s someone’s curve, I hope they don’t mind. They look like this. A little different from person to person, some individual weaknesses and strenghts, but you will always see this downward-sloping curve with a bit of a hockey stick tendency. 

On the Y-axis there is the Watt output of the rider. On the X-axis is a logarithmic time scale. The curve is like a scaling FTP report. Look at any time frame and you can find what is the maximum Watt that rider can produce over that time frame. The Watt for a 1h time frame is what we normally call a person’s FTP. 

In Zwift the 5 min power is also very important, and you can find that too. On the far left is the peak power when sprinting, and it drops off quite fast over time. And if you remember, the way to calculate your FTP is by doing a 20 min max power test in e.g. Zwift and then multiply that number by 0.95 to get the max sustainable 1 hr power. It doesn’t always hold true, though, but at any rate your 1 hr max power will be lower than your 20 min max power by some factor. 

Now, by looking at world records in sports such as track and fields or cycling (mainly track cycling), what sports science says is that you could infer an ideal power curve for mankind. The human body can only move so fast over a 100m dash. Likewise, the human body can only go so fast over the 1 hr track cycling world record attempts. I.e. unless we alter our genetics. Are top athletes at this limit already? Like stated above, sports science claims if they aren’t, then they are at least very close. Which could explain why e.g. Pantani’s record up Alpe d’Huez still stands since 1997 – a both fantastic and terrible year for cycling.

If you want to read more about what science says about cycling on the topic of max performance or perhaps about the physics of cycling in general, the physics Zwift’s computerized model most likely is based on, then I recommend this e-book. You can get it from Amazon or similar. It’s a really interesting read. A wee bit of maths in it – you can’t get away from that in physics – but explained in the simplest possible of terms.

Anyway, sports science claim that the upper human limit for the 1 hr FTP is 6.4 W/kg for men and 5.7 W/kg for women. It seems to check out. It does for track and fields. And no 1 hr world record attempt in cycling has ever crossed that line. Check for yourself! Anything above those numbers and you could fairly become suspicions. It would warrant a closer look. And an explanation of some kind.

All WT pros are genetic freaks. You cannot get to that level with determination alone, or you would run up against someone with the same determination as you but a better genetic disposition and you’d lose. WT pros have both the determination and the genetic underpinnings for performance at that level. But couldn’t it be possible that there are freak-of-freaks too? Guys that stand out even among the best due to some extremely unique genetics, one in a billion? It’s not impossible. It’s just much more likely there is another explanation to the results of such an individual, one such guy that really stands out. Or three.

Let’s return to the break-away in stage 5 in VTdF. I’m not sure what the ideal power curve would have to say about a 27 min effort, but it should at least not be higher than a 20 min effort. Turning the standard calculation to arrive at the 1 hr FTP from a 20 min test on its head, we could say that no rider should push higher Watts than 6.4 / 0.95 = 6.7 W/kg during a 20 min effort. I don’t have data on the average W/kg output for the trio during those 27 min. I sure would like to see it though. Maybe WADA and ZADA should take a look too. Just to be sure.

There are many ways to cheat in Zwift, like we have discussed in an earlier post. But there is also something to be said for Zwift racing. It brings visibility! You can easily hide EPO shots in coke cans in the fridge (in reference to a certain notorious rider in the past), but you cannot easily hide what EPO or blood bags or whatever bring you. Not in Zwift. 

Well, not unless you cruise WT Zwift races…

UPDATE: During the later broadcast of stage 6 it was mentioned that the winner’s W/kg average during the last 30 min of stage 5 was 6.592. 

Tagged : Cheating Theory

With the Tour For All previously as the debut and now with five of six stages completed in the Virtual Tour de France, the World Tour pro riders are beginning to settle in into a world the rest of us are already quite familiar with – the world of Zwift racing. So how are they doing? And are they cruising?

That’s two questions begging answers. Let’s start with the first question. A brief answer would be that the pros seem to be doing fairly well, considering the circumstances. What circumstances? Quite a few things. 

First, many of them are still quite new or even completely new to the platform. Remember your first race? Right. That sort of confusion. The ‘Imma fire off this truck powerup and then I’ll hit ’em like a truck with this early breakaway’ confusion. You know the rest of that story.

Second, we have all met these non-digitalized roadies that have negative opinions on platforms such as Zwift. ‘Zwift miles don’t count!’ That type of guy. They take some convincing and first-hand experience, and that takes time. You can probably find guys like that among the WT pros too. Or should we perhaps say, you could even spot them when watching the broadcasts.

Third, while the Tour For All ran the pros still didn’t know whether there would be any normal races at all this season. At the announcement of VTdF the UCI had already presented the preliminary schedule for the autumn of 2020. Zwift races will likely not make or break a pro contract, but a real-life race might. Obviously, any rider will put priority on the real-life events that will hopefully follow starting in August. Their hearts are into those (and not Zwift races) and it has to be that way since their world and careers are built around them.

Fourth, in preparation for the the real-life events many of the teams take a break from scheduled activities to create a little sponsor publicity by participating in the VTdF. But in the hunt for marginal gains, which is the only thing you can throw at your competitors in the very level playing field of a drug-free WT pro racing scene, would you be willing to risk screwing up the training plan your expert coach designed for you so close to the events you are gunning for, by racing hard in Zwift, now that your team finally managed to get away to some training location in spite of everything this year? Probably not. Not if you won the TdF last year, aim to win in September 2020 too, and happen to be scheduled for participation in VTdF stage 4. You are most likely going to treat the stage as a recovery ride and your directeur sportif is going to tell you that it’s all right, as long as you show up on the screen for the fans.

Fifth, even if you were willing to go flat out for an hour during your high-altitude training camp as a WT pro, you might not want to. Not if you’re a big contender. You may want to hide your cards just a little longer. Or if you are participating and decide to make at least a half-decent effort, you may want to rip off that HR monitor that’s been growing into your skin over the last few years. Why reveal your strengths and weaknesses to your opponents when you don’t have to? It’s all so visible in Zwift, all those well-kept secrets!

So, considering all these circumstances and more, I’d like to think the pros are doing quite alright already. And Zwift is doing quite alright with them. It’s a joy to watch it all. And already at the start of the VTdF there were few if any draft powerups flying off the front, so things are definitely picking up.

So far so good. But next question, are the pros cruising? 

Technically speaking, no. You can’t cruise if you’re racing in cat A+. And you certainly can’t as a WT pro. But it’s an interesting question nevertheless because it reveals things about the nature of Zwift racing. We’ll come to that.

In a way, you could say that Alaphilippe was cruising stage 5, for whatever reason, and I’m sure he had a good one. He didn’t cruise to cheat though. Falling minutes behind the leader is a terrible way to cheat if nothing else. Whether you still felt cheated on as an Alaphilippe fan, I leave to you to decide.

But then there is this other cruising tendency that you see sometimes in the WT Zwift races. It’s the ‘Let’s do this like we do it outdoors in this team sport’ tendency. Look at the women’s stage 3 for example. Parts of it looked like the average Tuesday night cat B race if you look at the W/kg numbers. Surely they could have gone harder, but for whatever reason the peloton settled for a moderate pace mid-stage. Bear in mind that nothing prevented the riders from sitting at threshold for the entire stage since none of the stages lasts more than an hour. It’s still not cheating of course, although we like pain faces on TV.

It was a bit surprising, though, since the female riders showed such aggression and willingness to suffer overall in Tour For All compared to the male riders. Why did they? It’s what happens if you have riders participate who can’t rest on any laurels, riders whose 15 minutes of fame only happen here and now. Like the women in cycling who struggle so hard to get a sliver of the attention the male events get. Or like your average Zwift racer.

If you want more WT pro pain faces on TV, I have what I believe to be a fool-proof recipe. Throw in a bunch of random, lone cat A+ riders in the mix and it will all sort itself out. Not too many, though, because that would only scare the pros away from participating. The pros may have the genetic advantage and more, but they sure aren’t 1-hour-puncheur specialists, any of them. In Zwift races, fear the zwifters.

Note that I am not suggesting that amateurs should have been invited to the VTdF. That is not the point. The point is rather to capture the essence of Zwift racing by contrast. Zwift racing will always be brutal at the front. It’s in the format, it’s racing on the breaking point, it’s in its very nature. And if the racing isn’t brutal, then something funny is going on. And then you may want to take a closer look at it to understand why.

Tagged : Cheating Theory

You have probably already heard about weight doping. That by entering a deflated weight in your Zwift profile you will become faster since it will make your W/kg increase. And there is no one around to catch you red-handed if you do this smartly and only participate in everyday races. Only suckers who suddenly drop a nice even chunk, like 10 kg from one day to the next, will look suspicious. ZwiftPower will react to those and so will fellow racers who might be studying their ZwiftPower profiles. Zwift, however, will not react. You can enter any weight you like at any time. And if you race in the lower categories and make sure to decrease your weight in the profile gradually over time, as if you were on a diet, who would dare to call you a cheater? You were just getting fitter and slimmer!

Weight doping, I would assume, could prove to be a big problem in the higher categories. In cat A you only stand to gain if you drop weight, one way or the other, as long as you don’t get caught stating a false weight before a major event where a weigh-in might be required. 

Speaking of weigh-ins, has it ever occured to you that real-life racers, as opposed to Zwift racers, don’t weigh in? Think about that for a second or two. “It’s just because we all race alone on top of electronic devices trying to simulate outdoor riding”, you might say. But is it really? Meditate on that for the next 30 min.

Now, here’s the thing. Did you know that the above is not the only form of weight doping in Zwift? Cruisers commonly use another form of weight doping, although I suspect that the general lack of knowledge of the cruiser phenomenon makes it far less conspicuous. We can call what cruisers like to do to stay in cat reverse weight doping. I will explain. But first a lesson in demographics.

What is, realistically, the weight of a Zwifter? Or rather, what is the most common weight in Zwift for, let’s say, a male rider (sorry ladies, but cheating is far more common among male Zwifters). This is where you probably google ‘avg adult male weight’ or something like that. And then you find that in North America, and northern Europe might be similar, it is something like a little over 80 kg or 180 pounds or so. So then the most common weight in Zwift would be 80 kg, right? Let’s pause for a bit and consider.

Weight, like most other human characteristics, are normally distributed, a statistician would say. Our weights will fit under a bell-shaped curve, like the badly drawn one I made below.

Imagine you squeeze in all adult males in the Western world under this curve. As you can see, 80 kg is the most ‘roomy’ area under the curve. More guys will fit in there than under other weights, with weights just above or below 80 kg coming pretty close. In the two tails of the curve are the people that either weigh very little or quite a lot. There is far less room for them, meaning there are far fewer of them. So yes, out in the real world something like 80 kg will be the most common adult male weight, with weights around that number coming in close.

But this is not what the Zwift weight distribution curve would look like, especially not in bottom cat D. First of all, in D it might be somewhat skewed to the right (whereas A and even B might be skewed to the left). Since category is defined by W/kg and since weight affects that ratio, it is only natural that there is an over-representation of the heavy weighters. But if we disregard the skewness, the below curve is what you would find in Zwift cat D (maybe a little exaggerated).

“What’s this spike at 100 kg”, you ask. Well, those are a very special type of cruisers, one that deserves a special mention. Don’t get me wrong, some people do actually weigh in at 100 kg and there is nothing wrong with that. But there are only as many as would fit under a smooth bell curve, skewed or not. The spiky bit would be these special cruisers. What’s so special about them? Why, they are just the cruisers who are bad at maths! (I have seen entire cat D time trial teams consisting of guys each weighing exactly 100 kg for a period!)

It is not uncommon for cruisers to inflate their weight. The reason is that these cruisers are way too strong for their category and need something to hold them down a little so they don’t get green coned or upgraded so easily. It could be any weight really. But why then is 100 kg so common? Because it makes it easier for someone who can’t handle a pocket calculator to keep within cat limits. And it makes running a time trial team much easier. To stay in cat D you must not surpass 2.5 W/kg. If you weigh exactly 100 kg (real or not), the highest Watt number you can average is a nice and even 250W. Now, if weights differ within a team participating in a time trial league, imagine if you at 100 kg would push 250W. Then a team-mate at 87 kg would have to go well over cat limits to stay on your wheel. Your team would fall apart long before the season was over since half the team would get upgraded to cat C! And this is why WTRL is running an esoteric categorization with mixed teams from various categories. It would be impossible to run a TTT league with the standard categories, and you would get massive cheating like in early days of TTT.

There you have it. Reverse weight doping. It’s real. And it’s coming to you courtesy of your friendly neighbor cruiser (not from me though, I don’t cheat with weight). And Zwift made it happen and will allow it. Even ZP will, if you play it right. ZP will try to fight it, but really they are just glueing extra wings to an ostrich. It won’t work, because they are trying to save a category system that was completely whacked from the start. It just won’t work.

Tagged : Cheating Theory

How do you spot us cruisers? As has been discussed in a previous post, you don’t. Not during the race. You may have your suspicions, but you can’t tell for sure until the race is registered with Zwift or ZwiftPower.

So what do you look for on those web sites? The easiest way to catch a cruiser is to look at the HR graph and look for profiles that don’t look like your own. You are looking for riders who had a much easier time in the race than you who did put in a lot of effort. 

There is a grayscale of course. Cruising isn’t black and white. But sometimes it is ridiculously obvious. I will show you one such example. 

Below are two riders participating in the same race. We will keep them anonymous for the sake of decency, and it really doesn’t matter. This is from just an ordinary race on an average weekday, just a random race on the daily schedule. One I didn’t participate in myself, I should perhaps add. You can find plenty of examples like this if you look for yourself. Cruising is common. Almost every race has cruisers.

None of the two racers did a spindown after the race, so there are no extra km’s at low intensity to mess up the pattern. There is an age difference but not that large and none that would really justify the winner’s choice of pace. Both produced the same average W/kg. There is a slight weight difference between them, the winner being the heavier guy, but it isn’t a big difference. Both of them are fairly heavy.

First, let’s look at this guy: 

This was a flattish race but with some short punchy hills, medium distance, under the hour. This is not a flat out effort. You can see that there have been moments where he was able to draft in a group that didn’t go full speed all the time (Zone 3). But boy, did he work hard! Look at the peaks! He spends way more time in the upper Zone 4 (orange) band than anywhere else. That is on the lactate threshold. He is basically doing an FTP test while racing, and you know how pleasant that is.

As if that wasn’t enough suffering in itself (I can picture his pain face throughout the race) there is also something else. Look at the time spent in Zone 5 (red). That’s VO2Max or worse. Now, the zones can’t always be trusted. Not everyone fits into the Coggan model perfectly. But it is probably still safe to assume that he was indeed in the red for quite some time, actually longer than in Zone 3 (yellow), tempo pace. He probably had to fight very hard in climbs to stick with the others in the group.

I don’t know about you, but to me, given a category system with effort limits, or actually, given any system, this guy looks like a deserving winner. Will of steel. He sacrificed a lot to get to the finish line. That’s a worthy winner. Only it wasn’t enough.

I would guess he lost the sprint big time, because he crossed the finish line a couple of seconds behind the winner. Actually, he came in 3rd.

Now let’s look at the winner of the race, according to ZP:

Can you see the difference? This guy spends most of the race fairly comfortably in Zone 3 (yellow) and even manages to squeeze in a little green there. This mass of yellow is what you get on an endurance ride. He is racing in endurance tempo and then pushes up some hills every now and then.

At times he does push hard, probably in climbs or other situations where he wants to decimate the group and drop people left and right. Two of them, at least, he couldn’t drop (for fear of going over limits), but he probably tried to wear them down. Cruisers do that in races. You try deliberately to hurt the others in situations where you are strong. And this guy is obviously strong all the way. So cruisers get to pick and choose when to bring out the hammer.

Are we sure he is a cruiser? I have looked at this rider’s other races and I seriously doubt there is a natural explanation, such as a heart condition that would motivate not going too hard. I have seen him work harder than this in e.g. workouts and apparently he survived. It should be noted, though, that this guy is a winner. He has lots of podiums on his ZP record. And I assume he doesn’t intend to leave his current category anytime soon. 

We have to remember that Zwift wants this guy on top, rather than the bronze guy. It’s part of their system and they have had all the time in the world to change it. But they don’t. They want him to win. They believe it is revenue maximizing to cater to the cheater before at the expense of the others in the race. You have to leave your moral judgements behind. This is Zwift! It is what it is. It is the place where the oversized fish eat smaller fish in an undersized pond. I will eat you next.

Tagged : Cheating Theory