FAQs

We wanted to include it! We even had it in our initial race database, assigned it a x5 (stage) and x10 (GC) race multiplier, and created pages for the results. The only problem is that… we couldn’t find complete results anywhere, not even just a complete list of who scored points. We rewatched all the broadcasts, nothing. Did we drive ourselves slightly insane trying to find results? Who can say, who can say. But all of this is to emphasize that we really wanted to add it, but just couldn’t track down the results.

Again, we haven’t been able to find official results for these competitions, which were all held live in LA, Paris, Vegas, and London prior to the first season we have in our database. Because we weren’t able to find results, we haven’t done a whole ton of digging as to whether we would include these races in our rankings. They happened before we got into the sport, and while we understand they were a big deal at the time and had meaningful prize money for the winners, in the absence of available results we haven’t done a full assessment as to whether they would meet our criteria.

They’re coming!!! It’s actually pretty tough to find which countries have held ECycling national championships. But we are looking into it and adding those races is on our to do list : )

Including only the SRC finals but not the weekly qualifiers has certainly been one of the more controversial decisions we have made, but we do feel strongly about how we have incorporated SRC into our rankings. You can read an in-depth explanation for our approach here.

The Echelon Racing League has existed in three formats. The first was Wahoo’s attempt to get into the professional virtual cycling game on its now-defunct RGT platform in the 2022-2023 season. Those races met all of our objective criteria, but the talent they attracted just was not at the level we look for, and so the race series that season was excluded. Echelon renewed itself on Zwift for the 2023-2024 season, and was one of most entertaining race leagues of the year. But the riders it attracted were heavily U.S.-based, which perhaps made sense since participation in the league was required to qualify for the U.S. national championships. But given how U.S.-centric the league was, we did not include it either.

For the 2024-2025 season, the series moved over to MyWhoosh and, critically, added a $10,000 prize purse. In part due to the monetary incentive – and because it was reported that recently-crowned UCI World Champions Kate McCarthy and Jason Osborne would be joining the league – we initially included it in our database. But unfortunately the better, deeper field didn’t actually materialize. McCarthy did not race, and Osborne did just one stage in the regular season. As such we’ve excluded the 2024-2025 edition from our database as well.

We love ZRL. It’s the biggest community event out there, and the competition is top tier. But we don’t include it in our rankings because the races are divided between different divisions based on time zones, meaning the best riders are often not competing head-to-head.

During the pandemic in 2020, there was a virtual monument! Pretty cool, but there was no women’s race, so it’s not included in our rankings.

We are planning to spill a fair bit of ink on this and the rise of MyWhoosh on our Substack page, but the short of it is fan engagement. The broader cycling community just… doesn’t really watch virtual racing on MyWhoosh at the moment, and the race multiplier we assign the monthly finals reflects that.

That being said, one of the changes we made in moving from beta mode to finalizing our ranking system was to increase the SRC race multiplier from x3 to x4. That might not sound like much, but given the frequency of the races it did end up having a material impact on the rankings.

Maybe! With the UCI World Championships moving over to MyWhoosh and Zwift being pretty explicit about creating their own platform championships to replace it though, we think that such an event from what remains the biggest virtual cycling platform is worthy of a hefty race multiplier. Plus, the first year of the Zwift Games was pretty awesome and each race drew almost as many viewers as the first UCI World Championship on MyWhoosh…

That being said, when we launched we had Zwift Games at a x15 (stage) and x25 (GC) race multiplier. We do agree that was too high, and after our beta launch where we solicited feedback from the community we lowered it to x10 (stage) and x20 (GC).

One of the issues we noticed most quickly in developing the site is that, because the esports format allows for unique (and very complicated) race formats, the terminology is all over the place. Because we want this site to be accessible to fans just getting into the sport, we elected to do what we could to simplify terminology and “smooth” the vocabulary you would need to access and understand races so that it’s uniform regardless of the race you are looking at. One example of this is calling every individual race in a series a “stage,” regardless of how it’s described by the race itself. To be sure, if there is any analytical meaning behind the terminology difference, we attempt to use and explain those terms. But here there isn’t – conceptually, there is no difference between calling a race a “stage” or a “round,” and using one term over the other does not convey a different meaning.

Two reasons. First, see the above response about wanting to smooth terminology across races to make the site more accessible to new fans. Second, and more importantly, there is a clear connection between the ZPD and ZGP in that ZGP evolved from and was a logical outgrowth of the ZPD. These weren’t separate, unconnected races. ZGP was just the next step in development for the ZPD. Because of that, we see these races as coming from the same heritage and group them accordingly.