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

Cruisers are devious adversaries. We will not stand out much from the crowd. The reason is we must not let our average W/kg go over limit. We have to be strategic with our energy spending and only put in as much as is barely needed. For this reason you might not even see us flying at the start like the average sandbagger. 

Try to lose us and we will still be glued to your wheel. If you somehow manage to drop us in a climb, don’t celebrate just yet. We may have had our reasons. For example, we may have noticed that you are light and easily caught on the flat just past the climb. So we save energy, or rather, save decimals on our average W/kg for later use. We will catch you. And we will drop you.

Very little that we do will seem illegitimate during the actual race. We will just seem very BIG STRONK to you. And our only threat during the race are other cruisers. They are our main competitors for the podium, not you. 

We must also take care not to get carried away by blatant sandbaggers, because sticking to their wheels will drive our average W/kg up to dangerous levels where we risk getting upgraded to the category in which we actually belong. That takes 3 months to undo, which is a long time for a fragile ego. And this, of course, is the reason you might not see us flying at start. Instead we try to find the frontmost seemingly legit group for our pretend category at start and stick with it. 

Sometimes we join a stronger group at start, maybe with a couple of riders from the category above, and then let ourselves drop after some minutes if we think we won’t have to drop solo. It doesn’t hurt our W/kg that much on the whole, but we can gain minutes on you early for hanging on to a group that would send you to max HR. Minutes gained that you will have very little chance to bridge. We are already going at max permissible W/kg and we are not that winded doing so. Exactly how would you legitimately bridge to us without being a cruiser yourself?

How do we stay within cat limits? Isn’t that hard to nail precisely for someone who has the strength to easily go over limits for an undue amount of time? It’s simple really. Your smart-trainer probably came with an app you can download and do workouts in if you are not a Zwift subscriber. That app that you never used since Zwift is much more fun. That app is likely going to tell you your current average Watt during a session. You use this app while racing. If you get problems with Bluetooth channel conflicts you can get around those by running Zwift over ANT+ and the smart-trainer app over Bluetooth on your phone mounted on your handlebars.

You will rarely see us pulling a group. We are good at staying in the draft. It’s not that we don’t have excess energy to spare – we do – but staying in the draft is a very efficient way to keep our average W/kg as low as possible, perhaps as much as 0.3 below the puller who may be going at limit. Thus we save up some wiggle room to drop people with later in hill climbs. You thought climbers were little guys who excel at staying at VO2Max for several minutes and recover fast? You thought this was fair racing? Stop watching TV and think again.

Tagged : Cheating Theory

As opposed to the other types of cheaters, sandbaggers in general and cruisers are quite easily spotted, if you know what to look for. In a mixed category race sandbaggers will be the riders who fly off the front at start and soon enough end up in a group with the next category above them or worse, their real category. It is really easy to spot a sandbagger. 

These days there are various counter-measures to sandbagging that can be used by race organizers. This is mechanics Zwift added during the spring of 2020. Sandbaggers who go over short-term W/kg limits will get a green cone of shame over their heads and will start to suffer a power brake that will eat away some of the cheater’s unnatural advantage. Some riders get DQ’d at the finish line for going over limits. For a period Zwift also experimented with ghosting the cheaters, i.e. to make cheating riders just disappear from view to others and from the results board, only they don’t notice themselves until the finish line. But these are just desperate measures that won’t the hide the fact that Zwift came up with a uniquely weird category system and that Zwift nevertheless still allows cheating. It’s like gluing extra wings on an ostrich. It’s still an ostrich, and no, it won’t fly regardless.

Remember that with a normal category system, one based on past results rather than past efforts, sandbaggers can only go on for so many races before they get kicked to the next higher category. But we cruisers want to keep the current category system because we are best friends with Zwift. We keep winning and Zwift lets us.

Cruisers are much harder to spot than the blatant sandbaggers during the actual race. The realization will creep up on you slowly and too late, if at all. A lot of zwifters don’t even know that cruisers like me exist, because they never care to look closely at the results board and the profiles on it. I will teach you how to find us after the race in a following post.

Tagged : Cheating Theory

Have you ever participated in a Zwift race and had that sinking feeling that someone, or maybe several other riders, were actually cheating. Chances are you were right. Because cheaters like me exist for real. We come in many forms and sizes. I will go through the most common forms of cheating below, so you know what you should look out for in case you didn’t already.

Hackers

A hacker will manipulate either hardware or software, or both, to gain an unfair advantage. On rare occasions when freeriding you can see somebody zoom past you at superhuman speed and W/kg. Such blatant hacking is very rare in races. If it happens, or rather, to the extent it happens, it is going to be far more subtle. Why expose yourself that much as when going 20 W/kg as it is only going to get you DQ’d, if not for hacking then for going over the set W/kg limits in any race category (no, you couldn’t get away with it even in A+).

I am not going to point you in any direction, but if you google around a little, you will find examples of tech savvy guys who have invented ways to manipulate the power reporting in smart trainer hardware or in software, just to prove that they could. What you will not find are the ones who didn’t tell you about it and who might actually be using it in real Zwift races against you.

Fortunately, I am convinced this form of cheating is very rare and nothing you will generally have to worry too much about. Cheating this way requires special know-how that few possess. It could also be too hard for you to spot anyway. Likely, Zwift itself is probably in the best position to detect deviances in power input or similar that should raise suspicions.

There are cases – you can google for those too – where suspected hackers have been DQ’d for performing ‘too well’. There is, for example, the case with a Swedish MTB rider, mostly unknown on the international scene, who got DQ’d in a big Zwift event for this reason. He disputed the DQ and Zwift sent him a Tacx Neo for referencing his W/kg. He could reproduce his Watts even on the new rig but from what I heard Zwift wouldn’t lift the DQ. Was he cheating? Probably not, or I don’t know. What we learn from it, though, is that Zwift takes hacking seriously. In that regard they are probably not much different from any other online game provider, which will typically ban subscribers on indications of hacking.

But the case with the Swedish MTB rider also leads us into another form of cheating. Sometimes you don’t have to actively manipulate hardware to gain an unfair advantage. It can be enough to – purposely or not – neglect to maintain your hardware properly. A miscalibrated smart trainer can produce excessive Watt reporting. Can it be systematically exploited in races? Of course!

Know this: I will never hack in order to cheat in Zwift.

Weight Watchers

Want to do better in Zwift? Improve your W/kg! This can be done in either of two ways, looking at W/kg as a mathematical expression. Either you start producing higher Watts, i.e. you have to become stronger or more aerobically fit, or you lose weight. Oh, and there is a third option as well. You can just enter a false weight in your Zwift profile. People who underreport their weight in Zwift gain an unfair advantage. This is cheating. Sometimes people will even overreport their weight in order to cheat, but that is a special case we will discuss later and under a different heading.

How can you tell that somebody is cheating with his weight? You can’t. Normally, you can’t. Sometimes, when looking at people’s ZwiftPower profiles, you notice they have suddenly dropped significantly in weight from one day to the next. It could be a case of “I didn’t want to get on the scales until I knew for sure I had lost weight as to keep motivation and not disappoint myself, sorry!” That would be unintentional cheating. But most of the time it is somebody who got tired of getting ‘bad results’ and decided to take a little shortcut, i.e. a regular cheater. 

Know this: I don’t weigh in before a race. I base my weight on the last morning weight. I check my weight fairly frequently although sometimes I might be sloppy and won’t check for some time, but I will never cheat with weight on purpose.

Shorties

A perhaps lesser known fact is that not only weight but also your height affects your speed in Zwift (and IRL). It does so because it affects air resistance. There is no wind in Zwift but the air resistance is very real and noticeable and is modeled on real life, or real physics. 

Air resistance is an exponential counter-force to your pedaling. The faster you try to go on a bike, the more you will notice that counter-force. At speeds up to 25-26 km/h it isn’t so bad, but above that it gets worse and worse for every little speed increase. Accelerating from 20 km/h to 30 km/h isn’t hard. It is far harder to go from 30 to 40 on the flat, even though the relative speed increase is the same! 

That is the effect of air resistance and it is a function of air density, which depends on altitude, and on the expression CdA, or Cd x A. Cd, or drag coefficient, depends on your geometrical aerodynamic shape. Low is better here. A cardboard box has a higher Cd than a ball. Note that it says nothing of the size of the object, just the shape, so a big ball has the same Cd as a small one. IRL you can affect your Cd by getting an aero bike, getting into the drops, tucking etc. Or by losing weight and getting thinner. Then we have the A component, and that is your frontal area. Now, Zwift reckons that if you are tall, then you have a bigger frontal area. It seems to be true that weight does affect your frontal area in Zwift, like it should.

At any rate, as with W/kg, if you want to go faster by reducing your CdA, there are two ways about it. Either you decrease your Cd, and you can’t, not in Zwift, except when changing bikes or going into the so-called ‘supertuck’ in descents at speeds at or above 57 km/h. Or you decrease your frontal area, A. This you can do easily. You just enter a lower number in the height field in your Zwift profile. 

Most people who start a Zwift subscription, even most people who sign up on the 3rd party ZwiftPower website to get their race results validated, don’t know about the importance of height when they sign up. So it is often quite obvious when people cheat with height. Suddenly, from one day to the next in their ZwiftPower profile, they drop 10 cm in height. That’s a cheater. You gain and lose weight but you don’t swing up and down like that in height. Any changes to somebody’s height is highly suspicious.

Know this: I will never cheat with height. I am 185 cm tall and fairly skinny. Or have been for all of my adult life. Eventually I might shrink a little from old age but I doubt I will be zwifting then.

Sandbaggers

A sandbagger is a broad, fuzzy and frankly quite bad term for any zwifter who signs up to a race category below his abilities in order to get an unfair advantage. You thought he was your peer and that you would race fair against him, but then it turns out that he has superpowers and hits you by surprise from behind, often already at the start. Formally, this is not cheating since Zwift will allow an A+ rider to join a D race. 

In order to prevent sandbaggers ZwiftPower (ZP) arrived at the scene as some kind of UN forces, since Zwift itself wouldn’t deal with the villains. ZP makes sure, sort of, that nobody with known better performance in a recent past can join a lower category, and get away with it. Well, you do get away with it. You will still show up as no 1 in the Zwift race report, but ZP will DQ you. So many riders disregard the Zwift results and only look at the ZP results. A bit frustrating to win a race without actually crossing the finish line first, though, don’t you think?

Cruisers

In Zwift you can cheat by exploiting the category system in a way you cannot in e.g. the US cycling federation categories or any other categorization that, similarly, is based on a participants past results. In Zwift categorization is instead based on past perfomance (W/kg), which is not the same as results. 

There is no external validation of past performance, meaning as long as you stay within a certain performance band, e.g. an average of 2.6-3.1 W/kg (cat C), in your races, then you ‘belong’ to that category. Zwift will allow you. ZwiftPower will allow you too, as long as you don’t have considerably better performances in your recent (3 months) history. Can you see the opportunities that open up for a cheater here? 

You can sign up for races in a category that you are way too strong for and you can win every time and still stay in category, even in the eyes of ZP. In US IRL racing and any other sport or computer game where a results-based category or ranking system is used, this is not possible. Keep winning and you will be auto-moved to the next higher category, against your will if need be. Perform worse than your peers and you will be offered to move down a cat.

So how do you do it? How do you stay in a category, keep winning more than your fair share, keep fooling ZP? It’s called managed underperformance, or cruising.

What you do is you enter a category below your abilities, keep an eye on your W/kg throughout the race, and try to keep your average W/kg at or below the upper limit of the category. You basically just cruise the race, until you hit a hill or a finish line. That’s when you bring the hammer down and beat the shit out of the low-category low-life peasants! 

As long as you don’t hammer your average above the limit you’re fine and in a very good position to win. The only thing you need to worry about are other cheaters like you. You can get carried away racing against them and inadvertently go over limit. The true member of the cat you are racing in, on the other hand, will mostly be at VO2Max at critical moments. They will drop like flies, all while you are merely cruising along.

Know this: I am a cruiser. I will keep cheating by crusing as long as Zwift will allow me. The only thing you can do to stop me is to try bait me above limit. If you succeed you will likely get DQ’d too.

Tagged : Cheating Theory