Category Enforcement - How is my category calculated? [February 2022]

Sadly my cat has not changed, should I off noticed a difference being bang on the cusp of b/c?

I plan on wheel sucking like a pro if you excuse the xpression

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I dont think it got any traction, but as much as we expect each other and people racing to be transparent, there is an expectation on Zwift to be the same - They should be publishing the boundaries for each Cat as they see them or in the companion app should an event director want to edit or alter them and at least helping racers see where they fall if not showing them the numbers that have been used to place them in their category.

Yes it might mean a few are able to continue gaming the system, but this will be much reduced and I would argue it will be much harder to stay with a front pack in a lot of races if you need to limit 5-8min efforts to stay in category.

Should be up to date? ZP is an absolute mess for trying get the league to work. I’ve had to change all the race settings to get it to feed through properly - and then whenever I change the course pen E goes back to mixed instead of female only. But that’s a topic for a different thread!

I sent you a PM with your request. Enjoy!

I want odds on me coming outside of the bottom 5%

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19/20 :wink:

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I can give you the odds on myself. It’s a straight 1.0. All bets are off. You see, I’m the designated gatekeeper in the gruppetto, I have my duty.

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The challenge is on! Kick ā– ā– ā– ā– , take names and let God sort out the wounded :grinning: (one of the wounded will no doubt be me)

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Well,that was painful. It was clear that there are a clear discrepancies in the categorisation system. Whilst I did better than I thought, seeing riders putting out 6wkg up to the arc each time against others putting out between 2.9 and 4.4 was a bit of a kicker, especially when they are 15kg heavier

Which race was that? 2.9 to 4.4 sounds a bit slow for B race and looking at c figures nobody was holding 6 w/kg up the kom. Sure they maybe had brief pushes to 6 but the c race looked quite manageable for top end C at the front.

Even the B race only a couple of them held 6 w/kg for a minute so while they are are differences as expected when a category floor to ceiling varies by 0.7/0.8 w/kg from what i’ve seen the racing at the front looking pretty fair.

I was in the B race

I was in the front in B, and held between 4.5 to 4.9 for a minute each time up Champs-Elysees. Probably top-10 each time when reaching the flat section. Usually one or two laps is much harder in B.

I was looking at something else in the cat enforcement event when this caught my eye.

Was anyone 15kg heavier really putting out 6 w/g? Up the climb? Because if so, one of the joys of the new system is that they will be upgraded if they have big short duration (2m) power. You were one of the weakest in the race for the course profile, so it’s no surprise that you found it hard.

The new category system is not the problem for you. The problem is that you are at the very bottom of a category when you are used to being near the top. The system itself is still hugely improved, even if you are a victim of the improvement.

What you should be shouting for is to allow race organise to configure the boundaries so that they are not always the same, sometimes you can be the hammer as well as the nail.

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Hey Gordon I was in the same race, even same group as Dappy-Muppet. There were three distinct groups that formed after a start that was hard to hang on to. If you look at the times, there are basically three groups one minute apart. The short climb probably accounted for that, our group was at maybe 3.2 - 3.5 for most of the climb after we settled in to our pace. Lost a couple over the top each lap but overall it was pretty good.

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Here is a link to one of the Streamers in the B cat.

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Please bear in mind that the figures I quoted was from what I remembered during the race, and then working backwards and looking at ZP afterwards. In someways I thought the new format worked really well and I felt I had a good race to finish where I did (anything above bottom 5% was the goal). In some ways it was the best race I have experienced in a while in terms of overall race fairness/feel but in other ways it seems quite poor. Having such large groups spread so far apart seemed to indicate such a wide spread of abilities over the catagory, and surely the point of cat racing is that you race against semi-similar abilities. I do however except for quite a while I will be the nail

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It’s important to hear in mind that 4 pens spanning about 1.5-5 w/kg in basic ability means that the races cannot possibly be well matched from top to bottom. There’s just far too much difference in strength.

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:100:. I kept making this point with the autocat shambles from last year. If you’ve got 4 buckets it doesn’t matter how you distribute the riders, there will always a be a disparity in ability.

What this is seeking to do is flatten out some of the peaks where people were able to game the system by avoiding (or just not having done) 20m efforts.

The goal isn’t for all riders to be closely matched in ability. Or at least I hope it isn’t. That’s boring anyway.

Drone on time:

Pen enforcement :white_check_mark:
Better categorisation system :white_check_mark:
Organiser defined pen boundaries :grey_question:
Global ranking system to measure progression / incentivise :grey_question:
Rankings as an input for pen sorting :grey_question:

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