Flanders World Champ course + classics

The 2020 worlds course will be in Flanders. It would be a great double dip to build a Flanders (or general Belgium) world to take advantage of the world champ course coming up & the annual classics that ride these routes multiple times.

Love this idea. Spring classic routes would be so fun to ride!

1 Like

Course information for Belgium: the course is absolutely brutal: Men Elite Road Race | Flanders 2021

I put a Strava route for the core of the Flandrien Circuit here (21 km).

I have a Strava route for the Leuven Circuit here (15.5 km).

I have courses for these prepared on RGT Cycling, where I’ve ridden the Flandrien loop, but not yet the Leuven loop.

I’ve said before we need Ardennes Courses n then the Pave Courses.

Riding the cobbles n up the Mur would be fantastic. :+1::+1::+1:

Zwift are an American company and I don’t know how much they think of the Spring Classics. :thinking:

On RGT, I have created the following courses:

I’ve ridden each of these and am fairly happy with the accuracy.

1 Like

15 days until the 2021 UCI World Championships in Flanders starts and absolute silence about any Zwift version of the course.

On the 1st July 2021 the UCI announced the esports World Championship will take place in Feb 2022 but interestingly also said: “While the first edition was raced on Zwift’s virtual island of Watopia, the UCI is now launching a bidding process for the hosting platform for the 2022 UCI Cycling Esports World Championships. The selected platform will be announced later in the year.”

Seems like the love affair between the UCI and Zwift has hit some rocky ground.

Unfortunately it seems like a Zwift Flanders world championship course is quite unlikely.

1 Like

A key weakness for Zwift is a lack of universal reality. 10 different users watching the same finish will see 10 different things. What determines placing is the reality on the server. But the television coverage is just another client, like each of us, so the finish order in the video may not match the results. This is less than satisfying.

Personally I’d want it to be on RGT, but RGT has a weakness in its wind resistance, where smaller riders have the same wind resistance as larger riders. This is a large handicap to small riders, like Caleb Ewan, among others. Zwift’s modeling of wind resistance is better. Also RGT’s scenery isn’t as rich (and for Worlds, it’s nice to have some eye candy).

But it’s too bad we seemingly won’t get a Belgium Flandrien world this year, after Switzerland was canceled in 2020, and Imola was declared to be too late a substitution.