I think it would be great to extend the UCI World Championship concept to the other Categories. Do an A, B, C, and D Championship concept.
You don’t need to stream them all live, but adding this level of climactic Championship to the other categories will build interest of a more broad audience to compete in racing leagues, will motivate some of the higher level teams to also include lower category riders, and encourage further individual improvement for lower category riders who might not feel they ever have a hope of progressing to the top levels.
The Team aspect could be really cool. Right now, all of the best teams are full of all of the top riders. But what if there were also Team championships at the other categories? This would motivate more community and would get lower level riders into the competitive aspect of the esports concept.
Sure. So call it something else. I just mean an event or series that mirrors the concept of a championship, of sorts, for all categories. I feel like this would more deeply engage the majority of the current Zwift Community that races. There are tens of thousands of people signed up and tracking their results on ZwiftPower right now, but only 100 or so have a chance at competing in that kind of event. Why not allow a chance for 100 at each level to compete in an event like that? It would engage more of the existing community, and probably also allow Zwift to broaden it’s user base if it’s marketed.
Currently the 10 highest B category riders on ZwiftPower are in the top 100 riders overall.
The highest ranked C rider is 635th overall.
The highest ranked D rider is 1,528th overall (although that rider only weighs 30kg).
My point is, it’s very easy to game the Zwift category system to drop yourself down a category or two. Not to mention it’s very easy to just ride normally and still be dropped a cat or down from your true potential (many of those B riders in the top 100 actually race in A cat anyway).
A world championship for the lower cats would provide a massive incentive to sandbaggers.
Policing the integrity of B, C and D cats to avoid sandbagging allegations sounds like it would be an absolute nightmare.
Opening up championships to all categories would be great.
I’d love to see a series that runs once a week - lets say each Thursday 7pm, UK. You either make it or not. But means its one race, the same race against the same people. Not to replace Zwift monthly series, but alongside it
Whilst I have no issue with this (although I don’t really think it adds value), most people outside of core Europe can make it at that time which brings back to core issue of how we schedule events.
Joke aside, get your point on scheduling. Fundamentally you’d have to have the monthly series as now (so its open to as many as possible).
For the “one race, one chance” events you could have a UK Series, Europe Series, US Series, AUS Series.
In the ideal world, obviously this is how it would be like any real life sport. You attend or you don’t / can’t. But from a pure competition perspective, its everyone in the same boat so to speak.
But Zwift has to, at its core, encourage mass participation first as per monthly series.
We’re kinda doing this (or rather Nathan is) with the headline race at 19:10 (UK) on a Wednesday.
Ha! I just saw this earlier this morning. I had missed that those were being broadcasted! Alas, I can’t make the race. But I’ll keep my eye out for the next ones. This does (kind of) accomplish what I’m talking about.
I also hadn’t thought about the potential cheating and category regression that people could do. Too bad that has to be a consideration, but I get it.
I do think there are more things that Zwift can do in the racing leagues to better appeal to mass audiences. I live in suburban mid-America, and basically everyone I know has a Peloton. Hardly anyone has heard of Zwift. But when I tell the competitive folks about what I do with Zwift, they’re all interested… But none of them, probably including me, will ever become an A rider.
It doesn’t make sense to have world championships, in any sport, where the dividing line between categories is ability. It just doesn’t make sense. Age-groups: sure.
I like the more broadcasts of lower cats although i doubt that time zone will be the fastest. Prime time two hours before in cat d we were over a minute faster so depends if you want to see top of the cats racing or just more exposure to lower cats then yeah the broadcast might be what you are looking for and who knows once people catch on they are broadcasting some of the heavy hitters might try out that time zone.
The biggest issue i see with getting riders more involved in anything more than your casual races is the hoops you need to jump through to make it happen.
likes of Dirt, FRR, TFC are doing some great work on their own websites and zwiftracing.app for ranking is great but it’s an extra step that is beyond a lot of casual riders to follow.
I’d love to see some sort of event organiser portal that supports team signup, various race formats, ability to set custom routes get accurate quick results, in game points, different game modes. (e.g elimination) the whole suite of what is on offer could be improved to make things more engaging for races.
Interesting times the competition is improving slowly