I agree. It was more a comment on the fact that power curves do in turn dictate (to a greater or lesser extent) success levels in different types of race.
I agree that a lightweight racer who excels at hill climbs might not do well at 60 minute flat crits, and that’s just “how it is”. Someone might be “cat 1” in terms of hill climb results, and therefore have to enter cat 1 crits. Even though they’re more competitive amongst cat 2 or 3 crit racers in that situation.
I’ve no problem with that - it’s how the real world works, and we as racers should play to our strengths. If I suck at crits but am great at hill climbs, entering a crit is my own problem.
Not side-tracking but going to the heart of the problem. You’ve correctly identified it yourself: organisers don’t understand, won’t change, and some perhaps don’t even care. No matter what Zwift does, it won’t change that mindset - unless it excludes volunteer organisers entirely or, as I have advocated, rations event slots to remove events that are similar to existing ones.
In the commercial world, it is much simpler: riders would not join races that don’t offer what they seek and organisers would go bankrupt. On Zwift that doesn’t happen, so you get glory-seekers putting on an event that’s like every other event, just to have their club/name on the schedule. And that includes the high-profile sponsored rides.
If you want something different and fun, join a ZHR race: your frustrations were mine in 2015, which is why I created ZHR.
I think its a fair point and I only join events where I knew the organizers are of high quality as that tends to mean better standard of rider too . I am in a Category however that is not affected by those who “game” the system as others such as @Andreas_Traff have detailed more eloquently and in more detail than I .
The only thing as far as I know you cannot do in an event is have absolute control over who can enter , whatever criteria you want to set . be it W/KG , race results etc . You can set the criteria but as far as I know you cannot ensure that anyone doesn’t just ignore that and enter the event anyway, Are you able to confirm that either way , I think then we have a great place to join forces to campaign for change and improvement ?
There is one notable exception of I think Women only events where it is somehow possible to prevent out of category entry . Which beggars the questions why is that possible., but everything else isn’t Why is this available for that criteria but cannot be enforced by choice for event organizers for say ; age, w/kg cat or race points (which while we have been cooking up ideas on how this can be handled I believe that data is in zwiftpower now to be used by an organiser if this was opened up . By API (If you can get access to it , you can get riders results for over time and/or more simply there zpoints even ) .
I think good organisers like you should have MORE tools at there disposal to make even better events and this seems like one to me.
Eric Min would apparently agree with you, but I’ve got to disagree. Perhaps for their very first race, it might be possible to enter the correct category by mistake - possibly by accident, or if they have no clue what their FTP is, or didn’t understand the instructions… But not after their first race, and there are many, many multiple repeat offenders.
This is some great stuff. Only thing i disagree with is. Someone who podiums alot is not natural. If everyone in a C race pushes hard there will always be a select few that can sprint hard for 15-30 seconds faster then the others thus they will always be the ones who podiums often. Thus zwift creates a system that if everyone rides lets say in the same true zone 4 the whole race and u had those same 40 people do the exact same race against each other 10x its very likely the same people would place in the top 5 most of the races.
Someone who wins every one out of ten races? That’s a pretty good result that is unlikely to be random, seeing as many if not most races these days have more than 10 participants in a cat. But no. That smells like non-random as in good, not as in cheating.
Someone who wins one out of five? I would absolutely not rule out that he is legit. Even lean towards legit perhaps. But it’s worth a closer look in my book. I’d look at other placings. How close are they to the top? Mostly podiums? I’d look at the rider’s weight. Is it a heavy weight rider? If he is, then that could be the explanation. I’d look at his finish times and those of the rest of the podium. Did he outsprint them? Was it close? Were they lighter than him? Or was he simply way ahead of them and likely piggybacking on sandbaggers? And I’d look at HR graphs on ZHQ. Do they differ a lot from others on the podium? Especially when he wins? There are these tell-tale signs. I know because I have tried myself and know exactly what to look for.
But what if it’s a lot worse than that? I can’t show you any profiles to illustrate what I mean. Forum admins wouldn’t like it, I guess, but it’s also against my principles to drag a stranger through the dirt, especially a cheater in Zwift. The cruisers exist not because they are evil or morally corrupt but because the W/kg cats create them. Cruising is the optimal way of racing in cat B-D if you want to win, so why wouldn’t you? It doesn’t break any rules.
However, there happens to be an anonymized cruiser race history (wouldn’t find the guy today myself since I never participated in any of his races) in this little tutorial on race selection when cruising that I wrote, if you like. That IS a cruiser. A die-hard cruiser. There are people like that. Browse ZP race results and you’ll find them.
But you don’t even need intent to cruise. Assume I race you in cat C and that I tend to do 3.0-3.1 W/kg. Assume I race in 75% zone 3 because I simply dislike getting too winded, while you’re mostly zone 4 because… you always went hard. Assume I get away with it without going over the W/kg limit because I’m 20 kg heavier than you. I never had the intention to race unfairly. I never asked for an advantage. But I am cruising. I will crush you on the flat. I will probably crush you in sprints too, especially in a longer race. I will crush you in shorter climbs. I won’t crush you up AdZ but you can’t drop me. I will win a lot more than you. It’s not natural. Why? Because you can’t counter me. Why can’t you? Because you aren’t allowed to. You will get a DQ if you try. No, it’s not natural. It’s just weird. It doesn’t look like a sport at all to me.
I wrote many are unaware of which category they belong to. I’m not denying that there are real sandbaggers
After reading posts in this forum and others, I think many new to Zwift racing are unaware of ZP and picks a category they think they belong to. Maybe they don’t have a clue about their FTP.
Those not so experienced will choose either D or C. Maybe D for a start. Those more experienced will choose between B and A. Maybe B for a start. I’m not one of the best, they say to themselves.
I think there have been many in this category of users this last year.
Zwift should have an unambiguous path the users can follow when entering Zwift racing. It could e.g. be qualifying races or an FTP test to set the initial category that would be mandatory to complete before entering a race. This is of course given the current category scheme.
When it becomes less credible is if they win flat and hilly sprints , flats and hilly TT , flat and hilly routes , long endurance and crits.
If , like me your sprint is not going to win you races you just have to not play that game , you have to break the sprinters up and dislodge them from groups on climbs or my more successful tactic by Time Trailling from a several km out . And round full circle we come again to the real problem for cat B downwards , doing those sort of legitimate tactics has far more risk of getting yourself moved up a category against those who just sit at appropriate category threshold and sprint for 20s. (cruising) . How many ways and times do we have to come to this conclusion , rider metrics such as wattage and w/kg is never going to be a successful way to race categorize riders because you can game that too easily.
The reason why W/KG is the demon (unless you are Cat A) is that it plays into the hands of Sprinters because that is how they win . Rely on the race being threshold until the last 30 seconds) . Having W/KG categorizations artificially sets that threshold hard and fast so everyone knows what it is … so all you need to do is cruise around at this w/kg , no one can pull away from you without going over category and thus getting DQ. If anyone tries you are sitting well without your actual performance ceilings so you can stick perfectly on the wheel no problem they get DQ you probably wont if you draft effectively . Result … Easy win every time (unless of course you are racing others doing the same tactic then the race then just degenerates into one to just to see who is the best sandbagger of the day .
The numbers I have calculated are from the recent Cape Epic Stage 1 and do support your theory. With D having the largest percentage of riders being UPG then followed by C. This is of course making the assumption that those riders need education/assistance in group selection rather than deliberately ignoring it.
The reason I did this analysis was to personally understand where the biggest problem area was coming from and as I have not seen any data to prove one way or another I though some needed generating.
My own view was to to provide some real numbers in support of the idea of stopping riders entering the wrong group. You can argue this data does support that, however the more I consider this and reading yours and @MRBaldi_T-ZHR posts it became clear my thinking was incorrect. Removing the results at the end of the event and only showing the results in Zwiftpower is an all round much better solution.
It does not matter what the A/B/C/D groups represent (w/kg, Age, distance etc) they are defined by the event organiser.
The power to remove sandbaggers is also at the discretion of the event organiser along with how else they would like to administer the events they run.
It would encourage all riders new and old towards Zwiftpower to find results and thus understand the structure of the event they enter (assuming they also didn’t read the summary when they signed up).
Their is only one set of result to view, those in Zwiftpower.
A much better solution would be if Zwift could just integrate the ZP results into the Zwift game, so users didn’t have to know about ZP at all. ZP should just be a backend service and the Zwift game should be the only user interface for race results.
But only removing sandbaggers from the results does nothing to stop them from changing the dynamics of the race. Anyway it’s certainly not an either/or proposition.
Very true and agree that removing them from the results does not address that problem at source. Hoping that not getting instant gratification would end up discouraging them. Not ideal but psychology is not my strong point and changing people behaviour is difficult.
I wouldn’t want them to go so far as removing the results website. By all means show “the real results” in game, but that would make them only available to people in a race. It’s interesting to look at other race results and the associated data, as well as having all my historical results in one place to look through easily.
The “my.zwift.com” activities list isn’t as nice to use as ZwiftPower either, IMO (I’m not a fan of the chunky “designed for a tablet” look).
In principlal yes but only if that didnt destroy the feature set and what the platform delivers .
I guess the concern is that i just dont have any confidence at this time that Zwift could do that.
While zwiftpower still retains its last dying value to the community some of us are still here .
It is absolutely true if they were to implement a merge it would be fantastic. If however that
was an assimilation in current world it would be more likely the end game.
As an addition, sure. But not exclusively. I don’t want to have to start the game every time I want to look at results. Nor do I have (or want) Zwift installed on every PC.
Having the entirety of ZwiftPower only in the game would be horrible.
